


Home Sweet Home

by Laguera25



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Physical Disability
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-09-27
Updated: 2014-12-13
Packaged: 2018-02-19 00:28:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 56,932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2367590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laguera25/pseuds/Laguera25
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Leonard McCoy found his second chance at happily ever after, only to have it snatched away.  Now he's in Georgia for the first time in five years, walking down the winding, asphalt drive to his mama's house and looking for absolution.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Homeward Bound

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Jewelgirl04](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jewelgirl04/gifts).



> Written for JewelGirl04. This fic contains MAJOR SPOILERS for my other AOS fic, Bones and Blighted Roses. Do not read if you don't want to be spoiled for that fic.

He walks slowly up the winding blacktop drive, duffel bag slung over one shoulder. He could've--probably should've--driven, but he needs the time to collect his thoughts and pull himself together. His heart pounds dully inside his chest, and a dull nausea churns inside his belly. His throat's too tight and too slick with the promise of bile. He wants to stop, to sit right down in the middle of the road and hang his head between his knees and breathe in the smell of hot tar and brimstone, but he knows that if he stops, he won't get up again. He'll just slump in the middle of the drive until he burns red as a lobster and the Ossirian roses he's clutching wilt and droop, as wilted and spent as the one for whom they're intended. So he swallows the urge to vomit and wills his feet from one step to the next.

 _And it's penance, isn't it, this walk?_ says the needling, pitiless voice of his conscience. _An act of atonement for the sin that you have done. You've always had to have one, a means of self-correction when you did wrong. When you were a kid, you did your punishment chores and did them again, until your muscles burned and your throat ached for want of water and you were sure you'd never forget how it felt to be wrong. After you murdered your father with the depression of a hypo, your penance was to drive Pamela out with your grief and self-loathing, to snap at the hand that reached for you with the last dregs of her abused patience and compassion. You didn't deserve her after what you'd done, and when she took you for everything, including your reputation, and swanned out of that Atlanta courthouse on a cloud of kiss-my-ass, part of you whispered that it was the least of what you had coming. You watched her go, and then you took the last hundred dollars to your name and bellied up to an Atlanta bar to wash your sorrows down with a flood of cheap whiskey. You spent the better part of a year pickling yourself before you staggered onto that shuttle with bloodshot eyes and stale whiskey on your breath, and almost five years later, the guilt you carried along with the sad remains of your self-respect still doesn't rest easy. It still haunts you in the night, when you're lying in bed with nothing to distract you from the hollow ache in your chest._

 _This walk is your penance. It's a piss-poor one one, all things considered, and far less than she deserves, but it's all you can afford right now. Maybe when your five-year hitch with the_ Enterprise _is up, you can manage something grander and worthier of her. You can apply for a position at the Atlanta division of Starfleet medical and bring her home to a city she hasn't seen in two hundred and forty years. If Starfleet won't have you, you can resign your commission and go into private practice closer to home. You can bring her here, not as a guest under your mama's accommodating roof, but as the mistress of the farmhouse you've been building and rebuilding in your head and on encrypted plans on your padd since that first shore leave on Risa IV, when she burrowed into your heart as deeply as your bed. Your mama had always promised you a few acres from the back forty when you were ready to settle down. It might be a bit of a commute if you end up in Atlanta, but it'd be a good place to put down roots and bring up a family._

The thought makes his eyes sting. Rosalie had been in his heart as deep as went when she'd taken sick, and before that awful moment when Dr. M'Benga had pressed that sedative hypo to her neck and the the cryotube had closed over her and sent her to a living tomb for the second time, he'd begun to dream of a second chance at a happily ever after. 

_She'd blossomed in the year and a half since you'd pulled her out of that cryotube and set to righting the wrongs of premature birth and indifferent handling by a world more interested in convenience than care or comfort. Rehab had gone better than you'd ever dreamed it could, and Rosalie had trusted you enough to let you put her under the knife three times. It was hard and painful, and you cried in the sickbay bathroom when she came out of the hip realignment surgery and immediately started screaming from the pain. You'd underestimated how much it would hurt to have your pelvis brought into alignment after thirty-one years of ossifying into position, and that first agonized shriek brought you out of your chair so fast you knocked it over, dizzy with adrenaline and terrified that you'd done something you couldn't take back._

Dr. McCoy, _she screamed._ Dr. McCoy! _So like her meeting with Dr. Boswell and your first, fleeting fall from grace that your skin crawled. She was shrieking by the time you scrambled to her bedside with your heart lodged in your throat, hands clawed in the thin mattress of the biobed and back bowed against the agony. Her eyes were wild and wide and beseeching inside her face, and as you read the bioscanner reading, your heart plunged into your toes._

I'm sorry, _you crooned as you reached for the sedative hypo._ I'm so sorry, darlin'. _You wanted to bend and kiss her, a prince freeing his princess from an evil curse, but you were still just her good old country doctor then, and so you pressed your hand to her forehead instead and murmured nonsense until the sedative carried her beyond the pain's reach. You administered an epidural while she was in the drug's embrace, and the next time she came to, she was numb from the waist down. Temporarily paralyzed, too, but it was a tradeoff she was willing to make, and when you tapered her off the block three days later, she offered you a sleepy grin and pressed a kiss to the inside of your forearm as you checked her vitals. Inappropriate, perhaps, and Nurse Ogawa tutted, but you passed it off as a side effect of the pain meds coursing through her veins. No one need to know if it was more, and neither did they need to know that it lingered in your skin for the rest of the day. That was your secret, and you were happy to keep it._

_She was up and at it three days later. It hurt like hell, and it made you heartsick to see her struggle every day, white-faced and sweating and gritting her teeth against the pain, but you were also ferociously proud of her successes, and sometimes it took all you had not to pogo yourself through the floor when she managed something she couldn't do a week before. You wanted to cry the first time she stood up in the parallel bars, unsteady as a newborn foal but straight as you please. It only lasted five seconds before her muscles quit, but a miracle's a miracle, no matter how small, and you still remember the expression of utter wonder on her face in the instant before she collapsed into your arms._

_You did cry a month later, when she took ten stumbling, wobbling steps from one end of the bars to the other. She lunged into your arms that time, and as she sagged against you, face in your chest and fingers clawed in the fabric of your tunic, she swallowed and panted and said,_ Well, that was overrated. _Dry as the Arizona hardpan, and you laughed so hard you cried, because it was Rosalie in a nutshell._

_Your fall might not've started then, but it sure took a steep drop. You loved her then. She was too busy holding herself up to notice your wet eyes as you rested your chin on top of her head, but you gladly could've held her forever. She smelled like honeysuckle and victory, and she was soft and pliant. You rocked from one foot to the other while her legs shook with exertion tremors._

That's enough for one day, hm? _you murmured into her hair._ Any more, and you'll regret it. But you keep that up, and you'll be dancing soon. _You did a shuffling little jig, and she giggled._

_Little did you know that you were speaking prophecy. A few weeks later, you found her in one of the rec rooms, listening to music and cutting graceful figure-eights in her chair. Wheelchair ballroom dancing, she called it, and you were mesmerized as she glided and pirouetted around the small room, a fragile bird finally free in flight._

_She smiled when she saw you standing in the doorway._ Good evening, Doctor. You want to dance? _She extended her hand._

_You shouldn't have taken it. You were her doctor, and it was a gross conflict of interest, but she was graceful and lovely and so poised in her chair, elegant despite her skinny knees and the AFOs that hugged her feet and clacked whenever she shifted them on the footplates. When she smiled up at you, you forgot how to breathe, and your mouth was dry when you stepped into the room and took her hand. It was so small and soft inside yours, but surprisingly strong when her fingers curled around yours._

You ever wheelchair ballroom-danced before? _she asked._

Can't say I have, _you admitted, and your heart fluttered inside your chest when she laughed._

Well, do you want to? _Asked with that soft, Southern lilt that reminded you of Georgia sunshine and sweet, summer peaches, and your knees went weak._

_You should've said no, but you didn't. You wanted it too much, wanted to see her as she truly was beneath the scars she wore like armor, light and happy and unencumbered by pain. So you let her teach you to dance. She reset the music and took your hand and led you through the basic steps with the same patience you'd shown her during her rehab. Soft voice and soft hands and plenty of encouragement when you bobbled or mistepped or nearly clotheslined her out of her chair on a twirl because your arms was too low. Laughter wound through the music in a gentle weft, and your skin tingled wherever she touched. You felt too light inside your skin, like you were floating, and as she smiled and spun around you with quiet, ebullient grace, your heart ached with a desire for something you couldn't have. You wanted to cup her face in your hands and sweep her from her chair and kiss the breath from her, but to do that would mean giving her up as a patient and entrusting the miracle she was becoming to someone else, and you couldn't do that. It would be selfish. Besides, you'd already proven you weren't much use to anybody as a husband. As a doctor, you mended and smoothed and eased. You healed. As a lover, you broke and scored and scarred. You hurt, and you'd be damned if you'd do that to her, put another hurt on a soul that already carried so many._

_So when the music stopped, you stepped out of her arms with a brusqueness you didn't feel and fled before you crossed a line from which you couldn't return. You buried yourself in staff reports and experiments, and in the days that followed, you did your best to distance yourself. No more shared replicator meals, no more idle chatter while you puttered around sickbay, no more leisurely strolls through the arboretum. No more swapping recipes and making peach hand pies in the communal galleys._

_You knew it was the right thing, but that righteous knowledge didn't make it any easier when she looked at you with wounded confusion, trying to figure out just what she'd done to turn you from her. You couldn't admit the truth, so you ignored her as best you could and told your guilt-ridden conscience she'd thank you later. You went right on telling yourself that as she shrank back into herself, growing smaller and quieter with each passing day. For the best, you said as she retreated into the glow of her padd, and you were relieved when Chekov came by now and then to take her to the promenade or his quarters for a game of chess and the story of how Russians single-handedly invented human civilization._

_It lasted two weeks before Rosalie gathered her gumption and cornered you in your office, head up and shoulders back and tired of your bullshit. You snapped and barked and bristled, but she wouldn't give up. You held your ground until she looked at you with those tired blue eyes and asked,_ But I don't understand, Dr. McCoy, what have I done to offend you so much that you can't stand to look at me? _Plaintive and lost, and though her eyes remained dry, a memory flickered there, sharp and painful, and her chin wobbled minutely._

_You broke then. You wouldn't hurt her to save yourself. You sat down at your desk and took her hand and kissed the knuckles and confessed your attraction. You also told her why it could never be. You were a better doctor than a man, and you could do her more good as her doctor than as the man who loved her._

Don't you think I should get to decide what's best for me? _she asked softly, and squeezed your hand._ Besides, the way I figure it, I've had a lifetime of doctors cutting and poking and trying to make me into something worth a damn. Maybe it's time to try something sweeter.

I want to, darlin', _you whispered._ You have no idea how much. But I can't. _You cleared your throat and forced the next words out._ It wouldn't be right. I'm your doctor. Just your doctor, and it needs to stay that way. _You gave her hand a final squeeze and lowered it to the desk._

 _She sat back in her chair._ That the way it's going to be, then?

I'm afraid so.

_Her chin wobbled and a muscle in her jaw twitched, and you were sure that she would cry, would fix you with anguished, wet eyes and call you a bastard and a no-good son of a bitch. You certainly felt like one as you sat behind your desk with your hands fisted on your thighs and wished for a bottle of bourbon, but the tears and the accusations never came. She just nodded as though that were the answer she expected._

Well, _she said, and straightened her shoulders._ I appreciate your honesty, Doctor. _Steady, but oh-so-tight, white-knuckled fingers curled around a fraying lifeline. Tears glistened in her eyes, but she never shed a one._

 _The tears made your jaw ache and your eyes burn._ I'm sorry, _you managed around the lump in your throat. Guilt and yearning throbbed in your chest like a hot coal._

Me, too, sugar, _she answered softly._ Me, too. _A deep breath, and she flashed you a bleak, fleeting smile._ At least I have that dance, _she said, and then she gave a single nod and spun away. Her shoulders buckled for the briefest instant, and then she recovered and went out the way she'd come in, with her head up and her shoulders back._

_You watched her go, and when the doors slid shut behind her, you let out a ragged breath and rested your head on the desk. You stayed there until you were sure you wouldn't fall down if you tried to stand up, and then you went to the gym and let a sparring instructor beat you black. Each bruise left on your legs, back, and chest was another apology to Rosalie for the pain you'd caused, an act of penance for tantalizing her with something she could never have._

_Things might've stayed that way. You might've been just another disappointment in her life, a bittersweet memory of what might've been. But then she picked up your padd by mistake one day and saw the paper you'd started back when she was just another patient, a fascinating specimen of an ancient and long-dead malady._

_She was sitting in the middle of sickbay when you walked in with her padd in hand and an apology on your lips. There were tears on her face then, plenty of them, and when she saw you, her face crumpled._

This is what you think of me? _She held up your padd._

 _You blinked at her in astonishment._ What? What in the hell are you carrying on about? _you demanded, but her tears harrowed your insides, because for all her fragility, Rosalie was tough as hell. Tears were a last resort, a failsafe when all other coping mechanisms had failed. Whatever she'd found had struck deep._

 _She lowered your padd to her lap and began to read._ The patient demonstrates a profound intellect despite her equally profound physical deficits, as well as a marked aptitude for critical analysis and problem-solving. Such abilities fly in the face of current medical opinion, which has long suggested that mental impairment is concommitant with physical defects observed at, or acquired shortly after, birth.

It has been noted that while her intellect is prodigious, the patient exhibits clear psychological scars. Whether these stem from the impairment itself or from the sociological systems in which she was born and raised is unclear, but the effects are obvious. She is timid and demonstrates a pronounced fear of causing insult or making a mistake and will often apologize without cause. Preliminary assessment indicates depression, PTSD, and deep-seated abandonment issues. _She shook her head and clapped her hand to her mouth to stifle a sob._

I believed you, _she said, cracked as fracturing glass._ Jesus God almighty, I believed you. _She shook her head again, and then she hurled your padd at you. You put out her hand to catch or deflect it, and it bounced off your palm and fell to the floor with a clatter._ What a fu-what a fool I was, _she said. She raised her hands as though to clap them to her ears, and then she abruptly lowered them to her handrims and shot forward to the door._

_You spun without thinking. You had one chance to make this right, to staunch the wound you'd torn wide with your bloodless, outdated, shallow analysis. If she wouldn't stop, wouldn't listen, there would be no salve to mend the hurt you'd caused, and you'd carry the ugly, festering guilt of it in your bones for the rest of your days, buried beside Pamela's outstretched hand and the memory of a thirteen-year-old girl whose life slipped through your hands. So you turned and grabbed, and for the first and only time in your relationship, you used her weakness against her._

_Your hand snagged her push hand and stayed her momentum so sharply that she popped a wheelie. Her head bounced off your lower abdomen, and she uttered a shrill squawk of dismay. She probably would've tipped if you hadn't been behind her. You set her wheels down again and rolled her out the door and into the corridor, and then you swung her around to face you._

Rosalie, listen to me, _you began, and crouched in front of her. You tried to take her hands, but she swatted you away and tried to ram you with her footplates._

You can just go fuck yourself, Leonard McCoy, _she snarled._ I've done all the listening to you I'm going to.

 _Your shins smarted from the jab of her footplates as she tried to escape, but you held firm and curled your hands around her wrists._ Rosalie, stop. That paper was never meant for you.

Oh, well, that makes it all better, _she sneered, and pulled against your restraining fingers. She uttered a furious sob._ God, I can't believe I was so stupid! _she wailed._

 _You released her wrists and cupped her wet face in your hands._ Why were you stupid, darlin'? _you coaxed, and brushed the balls of your thumbs over her blotchy cheeks._

 _She looked at you like you were an idiot._ To ever think for one second that you felt anything for me but good old scientific curiosity, _she answered, and shied from your touch._ I wish I'd never picked up that damn padd, _she spat._ If I hadn't, I could've gone on thinking that someone thought of me as a woman. I could've had that much even if I had nothing else. _She sniffed._

Rosalie, goddammit, _you thought, and then you leaned forward and kissed her, soft and sweet, because you'd be damned if you'd let her spend one more second twisting in that kind of anguish. You'd already hardened one heart against you through thick-headed neglect and bumbling good intentions, and you weren't about to repeat that mistake._

_She gasped in surprise against your mouth, and her hands clutched your shoulders in a spasmodic grip. Her breath came in rapid, shallow puffs, and you tasted the salt of her tears. She was stiff and unyielding for a moment, and you began to wonder if you'd made a terrible miscalculation, but then her hand released your shoulder and rose to cup the side of your neck._

Now you listen to me, _you murmured against her mouth._ That report was never meant for you. It was for a medical journal, which is why it's as dry as an old Communion wafer. _You skimmed her lips with yours and rested your forehead against hers._ And I wrote that three days after I pulled you out of that ancient cryotube, long before I knew just what I had.

 _She sought out a kiss, gentle and timorous and disbelieving._ And what did you have?

 _You huffed against her lips._ Hell, if I know yet, _you admitted, and caressed her face._ But it wasn't what was in that worthless report. In fact, I'm pretty sure there are no words to explain you, sweetheart, not in any language that I know. So I guess I'm going to have to figure out another way.

_And then you kissed her in earnest, breathed against her mouth until she closed her eyes and sighed and let you in. You wanted to take it slow, to treat her like a lady despite the fire coursing through your veins, so you held yourself to a fleeting, tantalizing flicker of tongue and a possessive nip of her bottom lip, repeated until she was panting and you were sick with want._

Miss Walker, _you said, and caressed her cheek._ I'd love to court you if I might.

 _She laughed then, clear and sweet as starlight._ I'd like that, _she said, and her hands cupped your cheeks._ One more kiss to seal the deal? _she asked, and stroked your temple._

I think that'd be fine, _you agreed, and kissed her again. This time, she gave as good as she got, hands on your face and in your hair and tongue slipping between your lips in tentative exploration. You hummed and purred at the contact, exhilarated because it was Rosalie, holding you and loving you and wanting more than a quick and dirty fuck just to scratch an itch._

_Though truth be told, your body wouldn't have minded that in the slightest. It had been years since you'd known anything but the urgent tug of your own slick hand, and you were starving for touch and tenderness, for a hand drawn to you by desire and not the clinging, panicky terror of impending death. The kisses you were exchanging were soft and slow, chaste compared to those of which you were capable, but you were hard as granite inside your uniform pants. You wanted so much more, but a courting was what you'd promised her, and a starship corridor was no place to begin one much less consummate one, so you pulled away and offered her a shy smile._

May I take you to dinner on the observation deck tomorrow night, Miss Walker? you asked, and shifted to hide your arousal.

You certainly may, Dr. McCoy. _She smiled and drew her thumbs over your cheeks._

 _You turned and pressed a kiss to her palm._ 0800, then?

That'd be just fine.

Good. _You rose and bounced on your toes. God, she was beautiful with a blush in her cheeks and kiss-plumped lips and a twinkle in her eye, and you reached out to stroke her cheek._ I've got to get back to it. See you then?

You know it.

_She squeezed your hand and kissed your fingers, and then she turned and trundled off to the life she lived when she wasn't in sickbay, stretching and squatting and torturing her body into positions and shapes more palatable to the world. You watched her go with a smile on your lips, and then you turned and went back into sickbay with her padd held in front of your crotch to preserve your dignity. You whistled your way through the rest of your shift and resisted the temptation to turn up at her quarters with a bottle of wine, and for the rest of the night, you relived the heady memory of her kiss, until you slipped your hand under the covers and jerked off, chest heaving and hips rolling and eyes closed as you imagined those soft lips around your cock. You slept like a rock even with your spend drying in your boxers, and when you woke up the next morning, you were thrumming with giddy anticipation._

_The first day of a beautiful courtship. There was that dinner you promised, and plenty more besides. Aimless strolls along the promenade and through the arboretum, arm in arm, plucking Risan dates from the tree and eating them by the lazy handful as you swapped stories of life back home. You delighted in feeding them to her one by one and feeling the brush of her lips against your fingertips and the card of her fingers through the hair at your nape when she pulled you down for a lingering, sticky-sweet kiss. Cooking in the communal galleys, making cornbread from your mama's recipe and pecan pie from her grandmama's and squabbling over the best method for collard greens._

_You told her you loved her over a plate of fried chicken still popping from the skillet, whispered it against her temple as she sat at the counter with a potato masher. The masher froze over a steaming bowl of half-mashed potatoes, and then it fell into them with a splut._

That's gonna have butter all over it now, _you said conversationally, and nuzzled her ear, elbows tented on the counter over the plate of sizzling chicken._

And you're going to get grease all over your elbows, _she countered._ Mind you don't burn yourself. _But her voice was soft as the wind through the summer grass, and her expression made your throat constrict. She closed her eyes and pressed her temple against your lips._ I love, you, too, Leo, honey. _And then she turned and pressed a blind kiss to your forehead with trembling lips. Reverent as the breath of God against your skin, and you thought your heart was going to pound out of your chest._

_No chicken has ever tasted as good._

_You took her dancing, too, in the same room where you'd first taken her hand, and it was there that you kissed her with hungry intent for the first time. You were dancing an intimate waltz. She was so soft, so sweet, and you were intoxicated by her smile and the honeysuckle on her skin. You wanted to touch, to taste, to explore and catalogue every curve and dip and freckle, to tease sensitive flesh with fingers and tongue and teeth. You'd examined her with a doctor's deliberate, dispassionate eye, had handled her while she was slack and pale and unconscious and lain her bare to your surgeon's scrutiny, but now you wanted to see her with a lover's passion. You wanted to feel her alive and writhing beneath your worshipful hands, wanted her open and sweat-slick and yearning, divested of every fear and self-conscious judgment. You needed to see her slick with sweat and taut with desire. You needed her to look at you with adoration in her eyes and fire in her belly._

_So when she turned and floated out of an elegant spin, you lunged and scooped her out of her chair and sent it rolling in your haste. You hoisted her into your arms and slammed her against the wall and kissed her hard and deep and eager, tongue and teeth and unapologetic lust. She gasped into your mouth and scrabbled at the shoulders of your dress shirt, but she didn't resist. After the initial surprise, she relaxed and purred into your mouth, and then her hands came up to cradle the back of your head._

Leonard, Leonard, honey, _she panted between frantic kisses._ Oh, God almighty, _she groaned, and pressed herself against you as you trailed open-mouthed kisses along her jaw and nibbled the shell of her ear._

Rosalie, _you breathed into her ear, and growled at the feel of her in your arms._

 _She chuckled low in her throat._ Well, hello to you, too, _she said, and the fondness in it only inflamed your further._

_You kissed her breathless and mouthed her throat until she whined and ground against you with an unsteady surge of her hips, and then you reached down and pulled her legs up and around your waist._

I've got you, _you murmured against her lips, and rocked between her thighs. You could feel her heat through the fabric of her panties, humid and intoxicating._ Hang on to me, darlin', _you ordered, and slipped your hand between your bodies to tease the damp warmth through the thin cotton._

_Her eyes widened in surprise, and the startled cry she emitted stopped you in your tracks._

You all right?

 _She nodded and thrust against your hand._ I'm fine. It's just- _She turned her head, rosy cheeks gone scarlet._ -no one's ever done that before, _she mumbled._

 _You were floored, your arousal momentarily forgotten._ Are you saying you've never... _You considered your words, desiring neither insult nor shame._ Been with anyone before? _you finished._

No, I have. It's just that it wasn't about a mutually-satisfying experience, if you take my meaning, _she said, and her cheeks burned._ It was a scorecard, a bet won. It usually hurt, _she admitted quietly._

 _You slipped your hand from beneath her skirt and cradled her face._ Oh, sweetheart. I don't know what idiots you were with back in the goddamn nuclear dark ages, but it's never supposed to hurt. Maybe the first time, but not like that, and not after. It's supposed to feel good for everybody involved. It's supposed to feel- _You kissed her gently and coaxed her lips apart with patient flickers of the tip of your tongue, and you didn't break the kiss until she moaned._ That's the way it's supposed to feel, _you said when you parted._

I don't suppose you'd be willing to give me further instruction? _she asked. She'd meant to tease, but you heard the shy plea behind it._

It would be my honor, sweetheart, _you replied, and carried her to her chair._

_It was a long, languid affair, that first time. You weren't sure what she knew of love between the sheets beyond painful encounters she'd rather forget, so you took it slow. You ushered her into what passed for your bedroom and helped her into your bed. It was barely big enough for two, but it was enough for what you had in mind. You kissed and caressed and teased until she was pliant as a ragdoll beneath your hands, glassy-eyed and restless, and only then did you take off her clothes and test the sensitivity of her flesh. She shivered when you kissed her shoulders and groaned when you mouthed the pale, narrow ridge of her collarbone, and the moan she released when you drew your lips over the crease of her elbow made your cock twitch._

_It wasn't until you got her in bed that you realized how touch-starved she truly was. You'd long suspected it, of course; you'd seen it in the eagerness with which she'd responded to your periodic foot rubs and pats on the shoulder. She'd stretched for them, a cat arching its spine into an absentminded caress, and pressed into your hands, eyelids fluttering and toes curling and flexing. But there in the bed, with nothing between you but anticipation, it occurred to you that there were parts of her that had never known a loving touch, that had known only the swipe of a washcloth wielded by an indifferent stranger's hand._

_So you set aside the heat in your belly and the heaviness in your cock and simply loved her from head to toe. You rubbed her feet and kissed her heel and savored the startled fan of her toes. You massaged her scrawny calves from ankle to knee and coaxed obscene moans from her lips when your fingers pinched the rigid muscles, and when your fingers found her inner thighs, she quivered and arched, and her nipples stiffened. Hands on her hips and a hot mouth on her sternum, and with every touch, she unraveled a little more._

Please, darlin', please, _she pleaded as her hips churned erratically on the bed. She was slick between her parted thighs, and her clit peeked from between her folds._

I'll give you anything you want, _you promised, eyes fixed on her face even as your cock pulsed with the need to bury itself inside her._ You just have to tell me what it is.

You, _she said._ You, darlin'.

I promise you it won't hurt. _You shucked your shirt and made even shorter work of your pants._

 _Her gaze dropped to your cock, which jutted proudly between your thighs._ Holy God. _So flat and incredulous that you laughed. C'mere, sugar, _she murmured, and pulled you into a lazy, open-mouthed kiss.__

__You swore when those cool, thin fingers wrapped around your cock. It felt so good, rain after a long drought, and you thrust into her hand. Throaty laughter, bourbon and smoke, and then she nipped your lower lip._ _

_This is one thing I'm good at, _she said with a wicked gleam in her eye, and gave you a long, firm stroke._ Well, that and one other thing, but I'm sure we'll get to that._

__The thought of her lips on your cock nearly brought the evening to a premature conclusion. You whined, and precome leaked onto her fingers._ Rosalie. _Ragged and breathless, and she grinned as you shuddered in her grip.__

__She ran her thumb along the underside of your shaft, and you bucked and huffed like a stallion in rut. She was gorgeous and there and yours for the taking, nipples peaked and cunt slick, and the need to possess was nearly a mania, but you wouldn't, not until she offered. So you held your tongue and libido in check and groaned as she gave you a long, twisting stroke._ _

_You're beautiful, Leonard,_ she said, and the quiet conviction in it tightened your throat. I knew there was something special hiding in that wetsuit, but I never expected this. _Spoken as though you were a god and not a plain old country doctor with countless scars beneath his skin._

Wetsuit? _you repeated, and thrust lazily into her fingers._

Honey, the first time you walked in front of me in that thing, I like to have died.

And here I thought you were the picture of fragile innocence, _you muttered wryly, and began to thrust with more intent._

 _She rolled her eyes._ Please. I've spent the last five minutes wondering if I should suck your cock or beg you to fuck me.

 _You groaned and bucked in her hand._ You don't have to beg me for either one.

_She shifted under you, wriggled until you were between her legs. The invitation could not have been clearer, but you asked all the same, because you wanted there to be no doubt._

You sure? _You thrust into her hand, and your cock skimmed her mons and belly._

_She nodded. You dipped your head for another kiss, and when she sighed in contentment, you lined yourself up and eased into her. A horrified voice in the back of your mind wailed that this was a gross ethics violation, that the last time you thought with your heart instead of your head, you destroyed the man you loved most, but then she was around you, hot and clenching and wet, and you no longer cared. She was Rosalie, everything you ever wanted, and she was holding you as though you were precious and priceless and not just an old, battered warhorse with nothing left but his bones._

You all right? _you managed, and your body trembled with the urge to rut and claim._

 _Rosalie only moaned, long and deep, and arched to meet you._ Please, honey, please please please, _she begged, and rolled her hips as best she could with muscles unaccustomed to the motion._

_The intent was clear, though, and thanks to years of jogging and horseback riding and mandatory Starfleet self-defense training, you had muscle to spare. Restraint crumbled. You settled your elbows on either side of her head, and then your hips snapped forward with an authoritative crack of meeting flesh._

_She jerked and shuddered and uttered a garbled yelp, and you thought you'd hurt her despite your best intentions, but then her eyes rolled back in her head, and her mouth went slack._ Oh, my God, _she whispered, and tightened around you._

I got you, _you promised as you set the rhythm, slow and steady and possessive, and you bent to mouth her throat._

_Slow, slow, slow, smoke rising through the pines on a winter's day, and oh, so good. Every movement of your body elicited a cry from her, ecstatic and disbelieving, and she met your kisses with raw exuberance. She couldn't thrust with any appreciable rhythm, but she could touch, could caress and cradle and tease with avid fingers. She etched fire into your sweaty flesh and breathed love into your ear._

I love you, Leo, sugar, _she crooned, and kissed the salt and sweat from the point of your jaw, and then her eyelids fluttered and she lost herself to the delirium of pleasure._

_You've had sex that was more proficient, an artistry of tangled limbs and swaying hips, but you've never had sweeter or more joyful. Rosalie laughed as much as she moaned and grunted and warbled, not from any malice or derision of your technique, but for the joy of it. She laughed as you mouthed her neck and lapped the sweat from her sternum, and when you lifted her up and settled her on your lap to deepen your angle of penetration, she laughed and cupped your face in her hands and called you her Leonard, darlin'. Honey from her lips to your heart, and you gathered her close and buried your face in the crook of her neck to inhale the scent of her._

_Pleasure took over in the end. It had been too long for both of you, and soon laughter was replaced by guttural moans and wavering cries and the urgent slap of conjoined flesh. You cradled her to you as you pistoned into her, and she wailed into your shoulder and dug the crescents of her close-cropped nails into your back._

Unh, unh, unh, she grunted as you drove into her, and her legs began to tremble. I'm-I'm-oh, God. _She gulped and gasped, and the muscles of her cunt clutched at you._ I need- _She arched her spine in soundless entreaty._

_You swore and growled at the sheer, improbable eroticism of it, and then you bent your head to accept her wordless offering and sucked a nipple into your mouth._

Yes. _It was a strangled, protracted wheeze, and the trembling in her legs spread to her belly. She was so close to the edge, so you slipped your hand between your bodies and coaxed her over it with a teasing stroke of your finger over her swollen clit. A tap of your finger and a flick of your tongue, and she was gone. The trembling became a convulsive, mindless shudder, and she threw back her head and howled. It was the cry of new life, a psalm of thanksgiving wrought of a single, unending syllable. She bucked and writhed, and you braced her so she wouldn't hurt herself or you with her frenetic thrashing._

That's right, that's right, my Rosalie, darlin', _you whispered as she rode the ebbing crest of her orgasm, and when you were sure she wasn't going to topple backwards and blow out both knees, you chased your own release. She was pliant and logy, dazed by endorphins, and her cunt twitched feebly with every upward surge of your hips._

My sweet little sugar, _you crooned, and stroked her hypersensitive clit._

 _She started and mewled._ My Bones, darlin', _she slurred, and the unexpected nickname on her lips drew an exultant roar from yours. You came so hard you went deaf and blind, and all sensation bled away save for the white-hot ecstasy that burned in your veins like phosphorous and coiled around your spasming cock like a lascivious fist. You emptied into her again and again, unending and insatiable, and you pulled her down onto you with every atavistic thrust._

_You were boneless and hollow by the time reason reasserted itself, and you could hardly raise your head. So you whined and suckled a nipple, and Rosalie keened helplessly._

_You opened your eyes with an effort and thrust lazily into the slick, sticky, rapidly-cooling mess._ You're all right, _you murmured, and pressed soothing kisses to the hollow of her throat. You slipped out of her and eased her onto the bed._

_Your first impulse was to get a rag and clean up, but when you tried to get up, Rosalie grabbed your wrist._

Stay? _Threaded with anxiety despite the uncoordinated torpor of her limbs, and in your mind's eye, you saw her lying on some filthy dorm-room mattress while some beer-soaked boor took his fill of her and left her with nothing but a sneer and insincere thanks for a good time. Her clothes on the floor and her wheelchair out of reach and the stinging ache of shame between her legs. You saw her dressing in the stink of sour beer and stale sweat and leaving with her head down and her underwear bunched in a tumorous lump beneath her skirt because she was too mortified and spastic to put it back on. The long roll home, with no one there to see her there safely._

 _You lay down beside her and curled around her._ This isn't 2010, and I'm not some useless frat boy who doesn't know what he's got. _You brushed strands of sweaty hair from her face and tucked it behind her ear._ I love you, and yeah, I might have to go a time or two, but I promise you I'll always come back. _You slipped your arms around her and cupped her breasts. No lust now, only idle affection._

_But the doctor in you never really sleeps, and it wasn't long before you coaxed her out of bed and sidled her into a bathroom too small for her chair and brought her a glass of water while she sat on the toilet and emptied her bladder. You brought her a washcloth and carded your fingers through her hair while she cleaned up, and when she was finished, you sidled her out and carried her back to bed._

Can I stay? _she asked as she turned and pillowed her head on your chest._

Yeah, darlin', you can stay. _You carded your fingers through her hair._ Just know I might have to leave in the middle of the night if there's an emergency.

_But there was no emergency, no yeoman with appendicitis or some engineering crewman who dropped a photon torpedo on his foot. There was only the softness of Rosalie against your side and the scent of her in your nostrils. You were happy, content in a way you hadn't been since the early days of med school, when you thought Pamela the bedrock upon which you would build the rest of your life. You dozed and drowsed, and now and then, you stirred yourself to kiss and caress her and murmur sweet nothings in her ear._

_You loved her a second time in the artificial night of your quarters, a blind, feverish tangle of limbs. You rode her from behind, chest pressed to the bony pikes of her shoulder blades. Your hips swiveled and snapped in a dirty, possessive rut, and she scrabbled and clawed in the sheets and begged you to stop and not to stop at the same time._

You want me to stop? _you asked, and nipped at the side of her throat._

N-no. No, _she stammered, and reached back to grope for your undulating hipbones. A snap of your hips, and her fingernails sank into your flesh. It stung, salt in a wound, and the nettling prickle was a delicious counterpoint to the simmering, narcotized heat of impending climax that pooled in your belly._

 _You grinned in the dark, feral and triumphant, and slipped your hand between her legs to stroke her clit, and when her cries became shrill and desperate and the flutter of her muscles thrummed beneath your hand like electrical current, you kissed the point of her jaw and whispered,_ This is the way it's supposed to feel, sweetheart. Always.

_She came apart against your industrious fingers, and she came so hard that you had to brace her against your hips so she didn't slip off and fracture your prick while she splayed and jerked. She was still straining against your arm when you let yourself follow her, and damned if she didn't shudder with a second, feebler climax at the sudden, sticky heat of your spend inside her._

Darlin', _she slurred as you collapsed beside her. She was limp and glistening with sweat, and she whimpered when you slipped from her._

Still need to work on your cardio, _you murmured, and nuzzled her temple._

 _You felt her smile._ And my muscle strength. But something tells me you're going to help me with that.

_You helped her with it plenty in the weeks that followed. In your quarters like as not, sprawled on the bed and mapping each other with tongues and teeth and inquisitive fingers, and you had to bite the inside of your cheek to keep from braying laughter when you heard Yeoman Connor remarking on her increased stamina and flexibility and improved disposition. You wondered what they would think if they knew that the arms and legs they were stretching with such grave diligence had been wrapped around you the night before, the dainty, china-doll heels hooked around your flexing ass as you buried yourself to the hilt between her slick thighs. You wondered what they would think if they knew that the same lips muttering dour imprecations under her breath while she battled through leg lifts and bridges and kneeling pushups murmured endearments against your cheek when you knelt in front of her chair and enfolded her in an embrace._

I love you _whispered against your lips like a secret passed between conspirators._

_They couldn't know, of course. No one could. One whiff that you were involved with a patient in whose care you were deeply involved, and you'd be hauled before the ethics committee and stripped of your license before you could spit. You'd be bounced out of Starfleet and right back where you started, with nothing left but your name and no prospects for crawling out of the hole. There wasn't much call for a doctor without a license, and you wouldn't be much good to anybody patching up wounds inflicted during underground pit fights in Chinatown or in dive bars along the waterfront. Rosalie might stay, undeterred by your disgrace, but you'd have no means of supporting her and ensuring that she was comfortable, no means of managing the pain ever nipping at her heels._

_And with no license, there would be no way to protect Rosalie from the clutches of dangerous fools like Moira Boswell, who saw her as nothing but an interesting specimen to be prodded and tormented in the perverted name of knowledge and scientific advancement._

_So you never said a word. She came to sickbay for her PT sessions every morning and took her breakfast and lunch there, and you greeted her just as you always had, as if she were a favored and familiar patient. No lingering glances or clandestine touches as you passed in the aisle, no assignations in your private office. Just crisp congeniality as you sat at your desk and watched her eat her toast and cornflakes and cool, professional scrutiny as you watched her rehab on the monitor with the sound muted to avoid stirring treacherous memories of hungry lips and eager hands. Strolls along the promenade three times a week to provide social stimulation and a change of scenery and a trip to the hydrotherapy pool twice a week to prevent muscular inflammation, and oh, God, weren't the latter an exquisite torture? You had to sit in the water and pretend not to notice how snugly the wetsuit molded to her breasts and tapered to her stomach. You had to pretend not to feel the swell of them against your chest as you lifted her from the water and into the sling and ignore the urge to kiss her breathless and lap the water beaded on her upper lip with the blade of her tongue. The effort was a sweet ache in the marrow of your bones, and you were grateful for the concealment offered by the back of her chair as you followed her back to sickbay. More than once, you jerked off in the changing room, your cries muffled by your forearm as you came into a fist that smelled of neoprene and chlorine._

_Truth be told, the secrecy bothered you. You loved Rosalie with a ferocity that dried your mouth and weakened your knees and hollowed your chest, and you wanted to shout that love from the rooftops to anyone who would listen. It was the least she deserved after a lifetime of being the dirty little secret, the tryst no one talked about the morning after, when the beer-fueled haze of good enough for government work receded in the harsh light of day and her wasted frathouse Romeo tucked himself back into all-American respectability, and you often felt a pang of sour guilt in the pit of your stomach as she sucked your cock in the privacy of your quarters. You could neither refuse nor regret it, not when the sight of her at her libidinous work, eyelids fluttering and head bobbing and cheeks hollowed with unabashed relish, turned your bones to tallow inside your skin. There was lust in every swirl and lash of her tongue along your shaft and over your swollen head, but there was love, too, resolute and unmistakable, and tenderness in her hands as she stroked your heaving sides or urged you deeper into her rapacious mouth. She wanted your cock, but she wanted everything else, too--the scars and the foibles and the sharp tongue that so often honed itself on the unsuspecting hides of imcompetents and blinkered ideologues and idiots too stupid to successfully operate the body God gave them. She wanted the irascible temper and the cantankerous grumbling over the latest medical journals. She wanted your opinions on current events and on history as you knew it, on ethics and philosophy and fashion trends of the young and stupid. She wanted your gravel-throated morning crotchetiness and your ridiculous bedhead and your inexplicable and barbaric love of unsweet tea. She wanted you, catastrophic faults and all, and the best you could offer was a furtive, two-door love affair._

_You were relieved when the truth came out just before Thanksgiving. It was Spock who found out, the sharp-eyed bastard. He was coming down your corridor with a question about the weekly officers' meeting when he saw Rosalie leaving your quarters with rumpled clothes and her hair in a mad, post-coital tousle. Maybe you could've deflected if you hadn't been kissing her goodbye in nothing but your boxer briefs and the wistful afterglow, but by the time you realized you had an audience, it was too late. To pull away or issue a spluttered, vehement denial would've been an insult to both Rosalie and Spock's intelligence, and so you simply sighed and gave Rosalie a circumspect peck on the lips and told her to go on home so that she wouldn't get caught in the inevitable blowback._

_Except there was no blowback. Spock was in no position to throw stones and prate about regulations against fraternization. Uhura had been his student at the Academy when they'd taken up between the sheets, and neither had been afraid to trade upon that position to remain together on the_ Enterprise. _He'd altered the assignments just as neat as you please the minute she marched up with indignation in her eyes, had caved before the specter of an angry girlfriend, and while it was to the_ Enterprise's _benefit(you've never met a finer communications officer than Nyota Uhura, and the Federation might've fallen without her flawless knowledge of Romulan and its various dialects)the fact remains that Spock unwittingly sent Gaila to her death on a romantic whim._

_And Jim, well, he had no room to talk on that score. He'd bedded Chapel and sent her off to lick her wounds on a remote science vessel and plowed his way through a dozen starry-eyed yeomen and ensigns. So for him to tut and cluck and wag his finger at you would've been the height of hypocrisy. Still, your gut was in knots when he held you back after the next staff meeting and settled back in his chair with his hands laced across his abdomen._

It's been brought to my attention that you have become sexually involved with a patient, _he said gravely, and slowly rocked his chair from side to side with languid rolls of his ankles._

_You considered lying, bluffing your way out of it with blustering denials, but your mama never raised a liar, and your daddy would've rolled in the grave your unthinking, desperate grief put him in if you became one at that late date, so you squared your shoulders and prepared to take what you had coming._

It was worth it, _you thought as the confession that would put paid to your medical career welled in your throat._ She was worth it. _Her voice whispered beneath the thunder of your heartbeat, and the memory of her touch danced over your skin like the promissory brush of wedding lace._ Bones, darlin.

She's the only one who'll call me Bones now, _you thought bleakly, and then you met Jim's gaze and said,_ Yeah, I am. I'm sorry for the position it puts you in, Jim, but I'm not sorry I did it.

 _Jim's lips quirked in sardonic amusement. You waited for his disappointed judgment and the summary dismissal from your post that must surely follow, but then he said the last thing you expected._ Are you happy, Bones?

 _You scowled at him in thunderstruck incredulity._ What?

Are you happy? _Jim repeated._

 _You sat back in your own chair and plucked at the fabric of your uniform tunic._ Happy doesn't begin to cover it, _you admitted quietly._ Jim, it's- _You stopped and shook your head._

Okay.

Okay?

 _Jim shrugged._ There are no regulations against a CMO dating.

There are a whole damn lot of them against him dating his patient, _you pointed out._

Luckily for you, I'm not a member of the ethics committee. Besides, if you ruled out everyone you might have to treat one day, you'd never date.

 _You snorted._ There's no might about it, Jim. I _did_ treat her, extensively. Technically, I still am. For Christ's sake, I laid her open on my table three times.

So end it.

I can't, Jim, _you answered, and Rosalie whispered_ I love you _against your lips._

So don't. Pass her off to Pennicott or M'Benga. Isn't it largely down to maintenance at this point? Rosalie doesn't need you to spoon-feed her through PT anymore.

Yeah, but if something happens-

If something happens, _Jim interrupted,_ we both know no piece of paper is going to stop you from taking care of her. Any more than it stopped you from wiping your ass with those ethics to save me. It might be M'Benga's or Pennicott's signature on the paperwork, but it'll be your hands behind it. Bones, _he cajoled as you wavered._ You haven't been this happy in a long time. Take it.

_You grabbed onto it with both hands in the end. You walked out of that meeting and straight back to sickbay, and you escorted Rosalie into your office and asked her to choose a new primary physician. She was stung until you explained why, and then she grinned and weighed her options. M'Benga won that particular shooting match; she still held a grudge against poor Pennicott for his ill-advised midnight hypo attempt in the early days of their acquaintance, when she'd been lost and frightened and wracked with pain. It took two days for M'Benga to conduct his preliminary consult and review your meticulous records, and you were relieved to see that he and Rosalie got along like a house afire. He was reserved and frank and even-tempered, with watchful eyes and patient hands, and Rosalie appreciated his respect for her autonomy and intelligence. You signed off on the transfer, and the minute it was logged into the system, you reached across your desk and took Rosalie's hand. It turned a few heads, but fewer than you expected, and later that afternoon while you were grabbing a sandwich on the promenade, you heard a young nursing yeoman tittering to her friend about the lovestruck Dr. McCoy._

About damn time, _came the laconic reply, and you nearly choked on replicated tuna on rye._

_Thing was, you were lovestruck, utterly besotted of this miracle that had entrusted you with her heart, and now that you were free from the fetters of professional restraint, you wasted no time in showing it. There were no overt displays of affection in sickbay; you were a doctor still a determined to behave like one while you were on the clock. But you often brushed or squeezed her shoulder as you passed her in the aisle on her thrice-weekly cardio circuits or as she sat in front of your desk with her nose in her padd, and now and then, you took lunch together in your office, where you could trade stories and kisses that tasted of mayonnaise and pepper and hold hands over the plastic forks._

_But even sickbay had to let you out sometimes, and the minute you were off the clock, you unfurled your courtship plumage and preened for her. There were no fancy restaurants or cozy eateries or picnics by the creek and necking in the moonlight, but there were intimate dinners on the observation deck and in the communal galleys and strolls along the promenade, and though you couldn't offer her the moon, you could give her the beauty of a nebula in all its timeless splendor and watch the awe spread across her face. You could kneel beside her chair and nuzzle the side of her neck while the silver light of a quasar danced across her cheeks and hold her hand while she marveled at the celestial fire of a meteor shower. Maybe you couldn't kiss her with the scent of magnolia in your nostrils or hold her on your mama's front porch swing and watch the fireflies flit in the lush summer sweetgrass or take her for a midnight horseback ride, but you could give her the universe, and for Rosalie, it was enough._

_You took her to Risa for Christmas. You booked a room for two at a beachfront hotel within earshot of the surf, and for the next week, you ceased to be a doctor and were simply Leonard McCoy, a Georgia boy with his heart on his sleeve and a beautiful woman on his arm. You traded your uniform and your scrubs for t-shirts and jeans and crisp button-downs with starched collars. You wore cologne and aftershave and primped in the mirror every morning and every night before dinner. You spent your days playing volleyball on the beach with the crew and hectoring everyone to remember their sunscreen, dammit, and your nights with Rosalie. There were restaurants on Risa, and plenty of them, and you tapped your credit account close to dry wining and dining her by candlelight just so you could watch the flame turn her hair to golden fire. You shared bottles of wine and bites of tiramisu and Ventaxian custard and kissed them from her lips in the privacy of the curtained four-poster in your room. You loved her to the sounds of the surf, and the salt sea air drifted through the open window to caress your skin. The sea seeped into your pores, and she tasted of it when you slipped your greedy tongue into her cunt and bid her sing._

_There were winding paths that disappeared into lush greenery and led to idyllic lagoons with cool, clear water, and moss-draped suspension bridges that passed over roaring waterfalls. Rosalie cast a wary eye upon the latter, whose planks were crude and brittle with age, but she adored the former, and after dinner, you'd wander them arm in arm with Rosalie's kisses still tingling on your wine-sweetened lips. You'd hum with the contentment of a full belly and let her lead you where she would, and when she found just the right spot, you'd help her from her chair and settle her against your chest or in the crook of your arm and stargaze while her hands roamed your body._

_And if those hands moved with lascivious intent, well, that was all right. The lagoons were deserted at night, and there was no one to see you surrender the bones you had so jealously guarded since that afternoon outside an Atlanta courthouse, when they and a hundred dollars were all you had left. There was no one to hear you gasp and whine and beg when she unzipped your dress pants and slipped her hand inside to curl around you or pushed them down around your knees to tease you from base to tip with the blade of her tongue until you hollered and fisted your hands in the wet sand to keep them from pushing her head onto your twitching, leaking cock. Nor was there anyone to see when restraint shattered and you begged and pleaded and thrust against her face like a horny teenage boy, fingers yanking on the collar of her blouse._

_She never denied you. That rosy mouth always opened to take you in, and you babbled your gratitude to the stars while you plunged into that wet, glorious heat. Sometimes, that's the way you finished, arching into that sweet mouth while her hand splayed over your heaving belly to steady you, but more often than not, you finished inside Rosalie, howling your completion to an overhanging palm frond while she splayed on her elbows and trembling knees and clenched around you like a throttling fist._

Bones, darlin', Bones, darlin, Bones, darlin', _she chanted, and then those stuttering hips stilled and seized and she wailed into the damp earth, hands clawing at the bank as she shuddered, and you could do nothing but follow, curved over her back as you emptied into her. She collapsed beneath you before you stopped pulsing, and you left traces of yourself on the swell of her ass._

_It's by the grace of God and the binary birth control you were both on that you didn't put a child in her belly. You left traces of yourself all over that beach. On the hotel linens and in the shower. On the hardwood floor of your room. In the fecund, black soil around the lagoon and in the rich purple sand of the seashore. Untold dreams of sons and daughters seeped into the bedrock of that alien paradise, and most nights, you limped back to the hotel with sand on your knees and in the seams and creases of your clothes._

_Now you might never get a chance to put children in her belly,_ says a mournful voice inside his head, and guilty nausea churns in his gut. The Ossirian roses rattle in his grip. He's coming up on the last curve now, and once he rounds it, the farmhouse will come into view, two stories of white clapboard that gets washed every year and painted every third autumn. It's where he was conceived and where he was raised and where, before Pamela had stripped him to the bone in retribution for his blindness, he'd thought to raise his own family. His mother lives there still, surrounded by a lifetime of memories, but her door has never been shut to him, and she's said more than once it'll be his when she's gone. He'd come to manhood there, and aside from the _Enterprise_ , it's the only home he's ever known, the place that holds his heart in every board and beam and tacky knick knack.

It's where Rosalie waits with his hope in the palm of her hand.

 _Please, please, please,_ he prays as his booted feet slap the asphalt and the flowers pant in his grasp like an animal run to ground. _Please don't let it be too late._

_If it is, it's your fault. You're the one who brought her to that godforsaken planet. You thought it would be good for her, a chance to get off the ship and exercise her historian's muscles. The civilization was primitive but peaceful, with only a few minor territorial squabbles on record, and the planet itself had been thoroughly surveyed. There were a handful of predators and venomous insects, but nothing immediately fatal, and besides, it wasn't as though she were going to be rambling over rocky outcroppings unattended. Like as not, she'd spend most of her time at the small cultural archives building in the city center, poring over dusty, yellowing scrolls and taking copious notes, or meander through the local bazaar._

_But when you got there, the local elect refused to let her enter the city proper. She wasn't clean, he said, as evinced by her physical infirmity. To let her in would be to incite alarm among the citizenry and risk the spread of her taint. As a courtesy to his esteemed guests, he would not banish her from the planet outright, but if she wished to stay, she had to remain on the remote outskirts with the other undesirables--the diseased and mad and lame. It was outrageous, the absurd superstition of the dark ages, and your heart still aches at the memory of Rosalie's face in the instant before the mask of polite civility came down, the flicker of hurt and the roil of bitter memory._

_You should've turned around and marched her straight back to the ship and told the beatific elect to kiss your ass, but the meeting was crucial to negotiations between Starfleet, the Ventaxians, and the Ferengi to establish a mutually-beneficial trade in beryllium, and Jim had insisted on your attendance. So you watched as Rosalie inclined her head in acknowledgment and offered a smile that did not reach her eyes and said she'd be delighted to speak with such lovely folks. Perhaps they could offer a unique perspective on Ventaxian culture. She gave you a single nod and a twitch of her lip, and then she spun and rolled down the narrow path toward the undesirable zone._

_You've regretted that ever since. You let her go down that damn road alone, without a hug or a kiss or a squeeze of her shoulder. You let her bear that insult without a tender hand to ease the sting. You've told yourself a thousand times that you had no choice, that duty was duty and orders were orders, but it makes no difference. You still relive that moment in the bottom of your bourbon, and your chest burns long before you take a sip. You should've dropped to your knees in the dirt and kissed her until you breathed as one. You should've taken her "taint" as your own. Maybe then she never would've gone down that godforsaken road, and none of it would've ever happened. But then, you've always been a day late and a dollar short, haven't you?_

_She came to sickbay two days later. Warm, she said, and dizzy. Sure enough, the scans showed an elevation in body temperature and white-cell count, so you tucked her into the bed nearest your desk and plied her with water and crackers, which she nibbled listlessly. When she vomited them up twenty minutes later, you still weren't worried. It was likely just the flu. You stroked her hair and held the sick bowl under her grimacing, spitting mouth, and teased that this was how you first made her acquaintance. She managed a weak smile and sagged against the pillows, feverish and pale._

_The first tendrils of unease coiled around the base of your spine three hours later. Her fever and her white-cell count continued to climb, and her eyes took on the vacant, glassy sheen of burgeoning delirium. You started her on intravenous fluids to counteract dehydration and were relieved when she cawed peevishly at you and tried to scoot away from the prick of the needle. It meant your Rosalie was still in there. You stroked her forehead, dismayed at the fire beneath your solicitous touch, and told her it would be all right._

_Liar, liar, lover on fire. The fever rose and rose. By 0300, it had risen to 105.2. The vomiting increased and was joined by diarrhea so severe the orderlies couldn't keep up. You had her moved to the private ward after the fourth linen change in three hours and assigned Nurse Ogawa and two orderlies to watch her around the clock. You took blood and stool samples for a complete panel, and Rosalie was so weak and disoriented that she offered neither resistance nor protest as she was rolled and prodded and swabbed. Her boneless docility spoke to the severity of her condition. Rosalie was fiercely protective of her dignity, and she would've screamed to high heaven to know some green kid was wiping shit off her ass with a sterile swab, but she just lay there, mouth slack and eyelids fluttering over unfocused eyes._

C'mon, Rosalie, look at me, darlin', _you pleaded._

 _She turned toward the sound of your voice._ Leo, honey? _she rasped as though her throat had been harrowed by rusty metal tines, and her tongue darted out to moisten dry lips._

It's me, sugar, _you answered, and nearly sobbed with relief._

'M not feelin' good, _she slurred, and her eyelids fluttered._

I know, sweetheart. I'm going fix you up, you hear me?

 _She moaned, glottal and phlegmatic._ 'M burnin', honey, _she said, and began to cry._

 _Tears were moisture she couldn't afford to lose, so you drew the ball of your thumb over her bottom lip._ I know, _you soothed._ You just trust me. I'm going to get you right again. Hush. Hush now. _You bent and kissed her, and her lips were sun-baked shale._

_She burned and burned. Now and then, she moaned and thrashed and muttered low in her throat, but it was broken and unintelligible. Sometimes she peeled her eyes open and looked at you as you hunched over your slides and microscopes, and her lips would tremble and curve in a smile that collapsed as soon as it formed, a rainbow strangled by obscuring clouds. Most of the time, she slept, and as night bled into day, her breathing developed a croupy rattle that made your skin crawl. The scan told you the truth your heart already knew: she was drowning in her own lungs._

_You were running a viral DNA sequence on the blood and stool samples you'd collected when the alarms of her biobed began to scream. Her temperature had hit 105.9. Your hothouse rose was burning alive._

I'm burnin', honey, _you thought as you lunged for her bedside and screamed at Ogawa and the orderlies to prep every cooling pad you had. Rosalie was a live coal when you ripped off the sheets and scooped her into your arms._

Don't you quit. Don't you quit on me, _you implored her as she shivered and clucked against your chest._ Please, please, darlin'. I just found you. Don't leave me now.

_You sprinted into one of the three OR suites, where Ogawa and the orderlies had filled a rolling steel tub with water and a dozen cooling pads. The water stood at 34 degrees when you dropped Rosalie into it, hospital robe and all, and you'll never forget the scream she emitted when freezing water met burning skin. Shrill and agonized, and her legs kicked and scissored in helpless, shocked spasm. Her hands clawed and splayed on the edges of the tub, and her kicking feet drummed an arrhythmic tattoo on the end._

Bones! _she howled, and tried to scrabble over the side and away from the frozen torment, but you placed your hand on her chest and forced her back into the water._

I'm sorry, sweetheart, but you've got to stay in there. I've got to bring your temperature down.

Please! Oh, God! Please! _She struggled and bowed against your restraining hand, and frigid water sloshed over the sides to douse your scrub pants and shoes. It was serrated steel plunged into your flesh, and your calves cramped, but you never moved, and your hand never wavered. You felt like a ruthless son of a bitch as she flailed and twisted and occasionally swallowed a mouthful of the icy water, but the doctor in you knew that if her temperature reached 106 and remained there for more than six minutes, she could suffer irreparable brain damage. So you let her scream and cry and claw at your forearm until blood beaded on your skin and oozed down your wrist and promised yourself that once Rosalie was out of the woods, you'd do your damnedest to make her forget this necessary cruelty with all the affection and adoration you could muster. She might hate you, but at least she'd be alive to do it._

 _You held her in that tub until her struggles began to lessen._ Leo, darlin'. _The mewl of an exhausted kitten. She swatted feebly at your hand._

I'm sorry, _you murmured, and fought to maintain your composure as she fixed you with miserable, sunken eyes._ I'm sorry, but you're baking inside your skull. I've got to get your temperature down, or else you'll suffer permanent organ damage. 

_She grunted irascibly at you, and the display of impotent pique made your heart swell because it was yet more proof of life, more evidence that Rosalie was still fighting. You patted her chest and sloshed water on her face. She lapped at it with pitiful eagerness, and you scooped handfuls into her mouth._

You just hang in there, darlin', _you urged._

 _She licked water from her lips, which were cracked from the unrelenting heat of her fever._ Love you. Love you, _she croaked faintly, and her eyes rolled in their sockets._

_You kept her in the ice bath for half an hour, until the cold forced her spastic muscles into vicious contracture, and still, her temperature hovered at 102. It started climbing the minute you pulled her out, and within an hour, she was back in the tub, shivering and shrieking and caught between the fire in her blood and the agony of her spastic muscles. Sometimes the cold seized her diaphragm, and she could only gape as her lungs fought for air. She was aware of her slow death by suffocation, and her eyes would roll to you as you crouched beside the tub, wide and beseeching. Sometimes, she tried to talk, but all that emerged was a strangled bleat. Her lips turned blue, and her hands scrabbled on the sides of the tub. Then the cramp would release, and she'd draw a deep, whooping breath and cough up clots of thick, yellow mucus and sag against the back of the tub._

_In and out, in and out, and as the day wore on, she became weaker and weaker, debilitated by the cramps and the oxygen deprivation and the vomiting. She lost the ability to hold her head above the water, and you donned a wetsuit and clambered in behind her. It wasn't protocol and hardly professional, but you were far past caring. All you could see was your brilliant message in a bottle fading, lost to eternity before the world knew its splendor. You settled her against your chest and rocked to and fro in an effort to dislodge the sputum choking her airway, and you exhorted her to breathe, Rosalie, breathe._

_And she did, bless her stubborn heart. Hour after hour as you sat in that tub, she drew congested, labored breaths, air pulled through wet sand. Her O2 stats went into steady decline, and her nailbeds went blue, but she kept breathing. You had her put on oxygen and bronchodilators to get her more air, and pumped her full of antiviral cocktails and decongestants and fever reducers and tried not to think of the damage such a barrage of powerful medications could do to her kidneys, which were already under stress from the dehydration._

Come on, sweetheart, come on, darlin', _you whispered into her ear, and brushed strands of wet hair from her cheek._ Come on, now. I need you. C'mon. Please. _Your voice cracked, but you didn't care. You were desperate and terrified and begging the universe for a miracle you didn't deserve._

If not for me, then for her, dammit, _you thought, and wiped a stringer of green mucus from her bottom lip._ It's not fair, giving her a second chance, only to end it like this. Don't let her die like this, drowning in snot.

You still with me, sugar? _you asked, and kissed the crown of her head. No answer, but she stirred feebly in your arms and turned toward the sound of your heartbeat._ There's my girl, _you crooned unsteadily, and carded your fingers through her hair._

_You strained your back lifting her in and out of that tub, but you didn't stop. You didn't want the last thing she felt in this world to be the slack embrace of a sling lift. So you mainlined coffee until your heart threatened to pound out of your chest and held a round-the-clock vigil. When you weren't cradling her in the tub, numb despite the insulation of your wetsuit, you were poring over test results and lab analyses. Her white-cell count was astronomical despite administration of antivirals, but blood and fecal cultures were negative for bacteriological infection. According to the tests, she had nothing more severe than Ventaxian flu, which should have manifested as a mild fever and nausea with a sore throat. Yet her system was responding as if she were fighting cholera, a disease eradicated in the developed world long before she was born. It made no sense, and your eyes watered with frustration as you combed through every report in search of the answer._

_Your eyes were gritty and raw with sleep deprivation when she stopped responding to verbal and physical stimuli on the third day. Her chest rose and fell with that horrible, wet respiration, and her eyes were open, but there was no light in them, no spark of recognition at the sound of your voice. When you took her clammy hand and told her--begged her--to squeeze your fingers, there was no response. No shift, no twitch, no croak of your name. You were crying when you conducted a brain scan, tears streaming down your face as you held up the bioscanner and waved it over her head._

Rosalie, dammit, you answer me now, _you snapped. If love couldn't rouse her, then maybe anger would._ Miss Walker, you need to wake the hell up! _But she never stirred. She simply blinked at nothing and breathed in jerky, sporadic bursts._

 _Dr. M'Benga, who had assumed the daily responsibilities of sickbay while you devoted yourself to Rosalie's care, gently encircled your trembling wrists with long, supple fingers and lowered your arm._ Dr. McCoy, I think it's time we accept that there might not be a good outcome, _he said softly._ There's no brain damage that the scans can detect, but the fever has been raging for seventy-two hours with precious little change, and her heart can't take the strain much longer. It might be best to let go.

 _You shook your head._ No. No. I'm not quittin' on her. I'm not. _After all, you'd quit on your father, listened to that oh-so-convincing voice of reasoned kindness and plunged a hypo into his arm, and three weeks later, the medical establishment in which you'd begun to lose faith unveiled the cure that would've restored him to you. You wouldn't make the same mistake with her, wouldn't quit to spare yourself the agonizing heartache of failure. You picked her up and headed back to the OR and its waiting tub._ Nurse Ogawa, prep the tub.

_Her gaze shifted to Dr. M'Benga._

Leonard, _M'Benga said patiently, as though he were talking a lunatic off a ledge,_ I understand. I truly do. _His dark eyes were full of quiet sympathy._ I know you care for her, but putting her back in the tub isn't going to do any good.

I don't just 'care for her', _you thought furiously._ I love her, and I can't just sit here and watch her die. Not like Daddy.

Please, son. Please.

Who the hell are you?

 _You shook your head._ It'll buy her time. Buy me time to find out what's wrong. _When Ogawa still hesitated, you snarled,_ Goddammit, until the captain says otherwise, I am still the Chief Medical Officer of this ship. Now you get your ass in there and fill that tub, or so help me God, I'll see you on a junk freighter en route to Cardassia before the week is out.

 _Dr. M'Benga sighed._ Dr. McCoy-

You do what you have to do, Geoff, _you said, and shifted Rosalie in your arms._ I understand. I truly do.

_You didn't wait for a response. You stalked into the OR and plunged her into the freezing water, and it was a measure of how deep she'd gone that she didn't so much as flinch. She just breathed in that godawful, phlegmatic gargle, and her hair fanned around her waxy, fever-blistered face. You climbed in behind her and settled her against you and hummed tunelessly under your breath._

Don't you leave me, darlin', _you murmured, and buried your nose in her hair to inhale the scent of her, but it had been soured by illness, and she smelled of sweat and bile and long, bitter goodbye. You'd smelled it before, in a dark, airless room that reeked of piss and fear and festering rage._

_You waited for Jim to come and strip you of your post, but he never did, and you loved him for that, loved him for giving you the time and the chance. He came two days later with sorrow in his eyes and regret in his voice and told you that you had to put Rosalie into cryostasis and prep her for transport to a hospital on Earth. You could choose, but she had to go._

_You stared at him in agonized disbelief from your chair beside Rosalie's bed._ Jim, she's too critical. I'm not putting her in cryostasis. It might kill her.

I'm sorry, Bones, but you don't have a choice. Starfleet has ordered us to host a summit between the Ventaxians and the Ferengi, and the Ventaxian elect refuses to board if there are any tainted on board. _Jim's eyes flicked to Rosalie, and he grimaced as though he'd swallowed a lump of cold gristle._

I don't give a flying fuck what he wants, _you snapped._ Putting her under has a high probability of killing her. _You scrubbed your face with your hands and felt the rasp of stubble beneath your palms._ Jesus Christ, Jim, she's not tainted. Don't let her die because of some outmoded superstition.

I know she's not, Bones, _Jim said quietly._ I know it's fucked up and disgusting, and I'm so sorry. I know what I'm asking.

No, you don't, _you croaked, and how could he? He didn't know what you knew, didn't know that Rosalie's parents had packed her away like old furniture because she cramped their style. He didn't know that her good-for-nothing brother had guilted her into it with the devil's forked tongue and never shed a tear for it. He didn't know because she'd never told him, curled against his side with her arms around him and crying so hard he had to pull the story from the anguish like irrigating grit from a wound tract. He hadn't known that Rosalie saw a cryotube as proof of her unworthiness, a punishment she'd earned simply by being imperfect. He hadn't had to hear that confession with his heart in his throat and try to love that twisted notion out of her with his mouth and hands, hadn't promised her that she'd never see another moment of her life stolen from her with every roll and snap of his hips._

_Now he was asking you to break that promise and do more damage than any drunken, rutting frat boy ever did or could._

_You begged and pleaded, but Jim would not, could not, be moved. His hands were tied, he said. The Ferengi were desperate to obtain a new supply of beryllium, but the Ventaxians, well aware of the Ferengi penchant for unscrupulous business dealings, refused to negotiate directly and had requested a neutral intermediary. Starfleet it was, and as the flagship, the_ Enterprise _had drawn the short straw._

_You asked him to let you go with her and oversee her treatment, but he refused that, too. When you tried to offer your resignation as CMO, Jim wouldn't accept it. He needed you, he said. The Ventaxian elect had been impressed by your dedication and professionalism and wouldn't be treated by anyone else. You offered to treat Rosalie in a med shuttle one hundred yards off the starboard bow and take a decontamination shower every time he came on board, but Jim just shook his head and pointed out with gentle pragmatism that you couldn't do that and respond to a medical emergency._

_You knew he was right, and though you knew it wasn't fair, you hated him for it. You slumped in your chair and took Rosalie's hand._

When? _Little more than a breath._

The day after tomorrow. I've scheduled her departure for tomorrow morning.

Jim, don't ask me to do this.

I'm not asking, _he answered, thin and brittle with regret._

_You nodded._

If you still want to resign after the negotiations, I'll understand.

_Another nod was all you could manage._

_Jim rubbed his nape and studied the floor. Then he took a deep breath and squared his shoulders._ Bones, I'm-

You're sorry. I know, _you finished gruffly._ With due respect, sir, your sorry doesn't do me a damn bit of good. Now, go on. She's still my patient until morning.

Bones... _fragile and beseeching, twenty-eight going on six, but you were fresh out of give a damn for his useless regret, so you ignored him and turned to Rosalie. She deserved your attention for whatever time was left to you._

_You took her down to the hydrotherapy pool that night to say goodbye away from prying, pitying eyes. You sat in the water with her and apologized over and over for what you were about to do. You kissed her face and stroked her hair and willed her to move, to open her eyes and look at you, to grant you an absolution you didn't deserve, but she was unmoving as death._

I love you, _you told her, and rocked back and forth._ I love you so much. I know you can hear me in there, so I want you to remember that. Will you do that for me, sweetheart? If you get where you're going and you wake up and I'm not there, it wasn't because I didn't want to be. 

_You prepped her for transport and made sure she was stable, but you refused to sedate her or put her in the cryotube. That was a treachery you wouldn't commit. It was M'Benga who did the dirty work. He intubated her and arranged her in the pod with compassionate, assiduous care and made sure there was no hair in her mouth. He'd sedated her with enough tranquilizer to fell a horse, but as he reached to close the pod, Rosalie's eyes opened. Her throat worked around the hard, rubber shaft of the intubation tube, and her eyes rolled until they landed on you._

_A flicker of recognition, then, followed by a strangled, unintelligible squeak._

_You moved to approach the table and remove the tube, but Jim, who had come to observe the proceedings, gripped your forearm._ No. No, Bones. You can't. You have to let her go.

_Rosalie was fighting the breathing tube now, gagging against its invading finger. She stared at you, and tears ran from her eyes._

Mnmmmr. _A muffled vibration of incomprehensible syllables that you recognized nonetheless because you had often felt it breathed into your skin in the instant before she sucked it between her teeth._

Jim, please, _you begged hoarsely._

I'm sorry, Bones. I don't have a choice.

_M'Benga approached her with another round of sedatives, and logy realization penetrated the fog of illness and drugs. She began to struggle in earnest, uncoordinated limbs flailing, and just before M'Benga depressed the hypo against her neck, she began to scream, terror and horrified recognition._

I'm sorry, Rosalie, I'm sorry, _you said as her struggles began to lessen._

The sedative should take hold in a few seconds, _M'Benga said as though that were a consolation._

_Those lovely blue eyes flickered with confusion and betrayal, and then they rolled back in her head, and the screaming stopped. On the outside, anyway. Inside your head, it went on and on. Jim was talking, squeezing your arm, but you couldn't hear him for the screaming inside your skull._

_M'Benga swallowed and closed the pod._ Cryotube closed, _he said unnecessarily into the painful silence._ Systems coming online.

 _You wrested your arm from Jim's restraining grasp and rubbed your mouth with trembling fingers._ Make sure you don't forget her chair. She'll need it, _you told M'Benga, and then you turned and lurched out of sickbay on unsteady legs. You had no idea where you were going; you just knew you couldn't stand to be there anymore._

Bastard, bastard, bastard, _your mind screamed as you fled, and your gut cramped with the urge to vomit._ What you've done, you can never take back.

_Footsteps sounded in the corridor behind you, and then Jim's hand landed on your shoulder, intending, no doubt, to offer comfort. You turned and seized him by the tunic and slammed him against the wall._

Dammit, Jim, _you snarled, and your lips pulled from your teeth in a feral snarl._ I've already ripped myself in half for you. What more do you want from me?

 _Jim blinked, and he raised his palms in surrender._ Hey, Bones, take it easy. I don't want anything, all right? I just wanted say I know how hard that was for you.

 _You snorted._ Jesus Christ, Jim, you sound like Spock. _You shook your head in disgust._ Behave like him, too, come to think of it. What is it he says? 'The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few'? Guess Rosalie was disposable.

 _Jim's eyes flashed._ I know you love her, and I wish there were some other way, but I have my orders. This deal needs to get done. If it doesn't, the Ventaxian economy could collapse. That puts three billion lives at risk. It's not a risk I can take, not one I have the right to take.

Where was this conscience when it was Spock stranded in the middle of a volcano? I seem to recall you didn't give a rat's ass about changing the course of an entire culture. Nor did it raise too much of an alarm when I stole Khan's blood against his will and raised you from the dead.

I never asked you to do that, _Jim shot back._

You didn't reject the outcome, either.

What are you saying? _Anger threaded with hurt._

It's easy to assess the worth of a life when it means nothing to you. _You released the front of his uniform tunic and shook your head._

 _Jim rolled his shoulders and smoothed the front of his shirt._ I know-

No, you don't know! _you shouted, anguished. Then, more quietly,_ I love her, Jim. Christ, I- _You broke off and shook your head. You couldn't tell him about those small, quiet plans on your padd, those two-dimensional representations of happily ever after._ You don't know because tonight, you're going to go home to Carol Marcus or whoever it is that's caught your fancy this week, and I'm going to go home and see all the empty spaces where Rosalie ought to be, and there won't be enough noise in the world to block out her screaming. She's going to be light years away, stuffed into that godforsaken pod that could malfunction in transit, stowed on a med shuttle like goddamn freight. _Your hands curled into fists, and you thought your chest was going to collapse in upon itself._ And if she wakes up, if, Jim, and it's a mighty big if, the last memory she's going to have is me burying her alive again.

 _Jim opened his mouth to speak, but you cut him off with a ruthless slice of your hand through the air between you._ I don't care, Jim, _you said, and the words were ground glass in your throat._ I don't care that you're sorry. Being CMO is the only thing I've got left, so sickbay will be decontaminated by the time the Ventaxians arrive, and I'll do my best to accommodate the needs of that bastard elect. Now please, Jim, be my fucking friend for once in your life and let me get out of here so I don't have to watch them taking my gi- _you stumbled over the words._ -don't have to watch them take her.

_You were as good as your word. Sickbay was pristine by the time the Ventaxians arrived the following morning, and you were crisp and clear-eyed in your best tunic as the elect swanned through the facilities and complimented you on your keen sense of cleanliness and order. You grunted your insincere thanks and clasped your hands behind your back and squeezed your wrist until the flesh throbbed and bruised, and you wondered what he would think if he knew you'd spent the night before emptying your guts into the steel toilet in your quarters and filling them afresh with the bourbon you kept in the bottom drawer of your desk. For medicinal purposes, of course._

_You were scrupulous and attentive to your guest's endless litany of needs and complaints(the elect was a Grade-A hypochondriac), but you contacted the med shuttle every day to check Rosalie's status. You knew it wouldn't change, that she would sleep inside that medical-grade sarcophagus until they thawed her out and she either died or beat the odds, but it was better than doing nothing, so you asked a question to which you knew there could only be one answer, and then you clicked off the com and tried to breathe through the strangling knot of guilt in the center of your chest._

_It took eleven days for the shuttle to reach Emory University Hospital. You figured that if you were going to send her off to die alone and unmourned and chucked into a cheap pauper's grave, you could at least be sure she went into familiar ground. The transmission came in just after lunch. A young nurse who barely looked old enough to drink announced her arrival like a goddamned flight attendant announcing destinations, and you wanted to reach through the screen and shake her until her teeth rattled. Instead, you held the urge to vomit behind your teeth and asked,_ Has she been brought out of stasis?

We've started the process, but given the seriousness of her condition, Dr. Rahood is taking it slowly.

And what is her condition?

 _A sympathetic smile._ I'm sorry, Dr. McCoy, but that's confidential.

 _You mustered a bleak smile._ Yeah. Thanks. _You turned off the com and collapsed into your seat, but before you could descend into a nervous breakdown, the elect and his vassal swept in with yet another litany of complaints. You had no choice but to stifle your misery and reach for your bioscanner._

_It might've been confidential, but you found out anyway. As CMO, you had access to all patient files, and after M'Benga retired to his quarters at the end of his shift, you accessed all transmissions and status reports regarding one Walker, Rosalie. You read about her unresponsiveness and the fever that refused to release its murderous hold and the pair of febrile seizures it spawned. You watched the attached video footage of their painstaking resuscitation efforts, watched her twitch and convulse in the throes of seizures, and when the videos ended, you watched them again. Because it was what you deserved. Over and over, until the images etched themselves into your brain and your chest heaved and your throat swelled with sounds of broken, animal grief._

Look at what you've done, _hissed your conscience._ Your love destroys everything it touches. _Your ears rang with Rosalie's screams, and in your mind's eye, you saw Pamela swanning down the steps of that Atlanta courthouse with venom on her lips and kiss-my-ass in every swing of her hips._

Jesus God, _you thought, and fumbled in the bottom drawer of your desk for your rapidly-dwindling bourbon._ I killed her. I killed my Rosalie. It would've been better if she'd never met me.

_But that didn't stop you from reading every report and watching every video. So it was that you saw her cheat death a second time. The fever broke three days after she arrived at Emory, and Rosalie returned to the world four days later. She came up screaming and scared the ever-loving shit out of everyone on the ward, and as doctors and nurses clustered around her, taking readings and asking questions, her wild-eyed gaze swept the room. Then she spoke for the first and only time during her three-month stay in Atlanta's premier hospital._

_Dr. Rahood didn't understand and thought it might be indicative of brain damage, but you understood them perfectly, and when you heard the words, your knees turned to water and your heart was wrenched from your chest by a ruthless, unseen hand._

Where's my lovely Bones? _Slurred and forlorn, and then her chest hitched, and she loosed a wail so full of betrayal and simple, ugly grief that you flinched._

 _Where's my lovely Bones?_ Those words and the grief that followed are what have set his feet on this winding path and led him to his childhood home with a bouquet of Ossirian roses in his sweating fist. They've haunted his dreams and echoed in his mind, replayed in an endless loop while he stood in front of that bastard elect and mended wounds he didn't have. They've tempted him to jam an empty syringe into that smug bastard's throat and watch him choke on his own smug superiority. They've sharpened his teeth on the unsuspecting and undeserving hides of his staff, who have begun to cringe at his mere presence and creep through sickbay on eggshells, lest a misstep triggers the crushing snap of his ill-tempered jaws.

 _Where's my lovely Bones?_ He's under no illusion that the flowers he carries will atone for the hurt he's inflicted; frankly, he's not sure anything can, but maybe they will signify his intentions, tell her that he never meant it, that his heart is still hers if she wants it.

 _I doubt that, Leonard,_ Pamela sneers. _I doubt that very much._

 _That makes two of us,_ he thinks dourly, and trudges around the final curve, footsore and heartsick.

The farmhouse comes into view, white clapboard bright against the flawless, dreamy blue of the early autumn sky. The porch and neatly-trimmed yard are just as he remembers them, and his heart skips a beat despite his misery. He's home for the first time in five years, and his bones cry out for the comfort of his mother's arms.

The screen door opens while he's still ten yards out, and his mother clatters down the porch steps and rushes to meet him. She's spry despite her years, and she closes the distance with astonishing speed and throws her arms around his neck.

"Mama," he says, and he wants to cry because she's warm and safe and soft despite arms made muscular by decades of lifting milk pails and hay bales and feed buckets. He drops his duffel with a soft whump and returns the embrace, face buried in the crook of her neck.

"Oh, Len, honey, let me get a look at you," she says, and smooths his hair, but he doesn't raise his head right away. Instead, he tightens his grip and inhales the familiar scent of his mother, hay and sweetgrass and Ivory soap.

"Mama," he repeats unsteadily. He takes a deep breath to gather himself, and then he raises his head. 

"Oh, sugar," she says, and cups his face in her hands. "What in God's name have you done to yourself, son? You look like you haven't slept in weeks."

_That's because I haven't. Every time I close my eyes, I hear my Rosalie screaming, thinking I turned her out._

She searches his face, and her eyes soften. "You've been tearin' yourself up about that girl, haven't you?"

He nods. "How is she?"

She sighs and rises on her toes to kiss his forehead. "Sometimes, your heart's too big for your own good. You've been worrying yourself sick."

"Mama-"

She pats his cheeks. "C'mon inside. You need a cold drink and a place to settle your bones." She steers him toward the house.

 _They're about all I've got left,_ he muses morosely, and reaches down to snag his bag.

He's hit by the smell of collard greens and his Mama's cornbread as soon as he steps inside, and as the screen door bangs shut behind him, he sways against a wave of fierce homesickness.

 _Home, home, home,_ his heart sings with every beat, and his jubilation only increases when he hears the clack of claws on kitchen linoleum.

He drops his duffel beside the door and follows his mother through the living room and into the kitchen, and then he stops, because Rosalie's sitting at the kitchen table, head bent to the task of hulling peas. Karl, the German Shepherd, is flopped beside her wheel, and Toot, his mother's pearl cockatiel, is perched on her shoulder and nibbling amiably on her hair.

She looks up at the sound of footsteps, and her hands still, one thumbnail piercing the hull of a pod of sugar peas. "Leonard, honey?" she says, and the disbelieving joy in her voice unzips his guts as neatly as her fingers dispatch the peas.

His throat works, but nothing emerges, and his legs refuse to carry him to her. He can only stare with his heart lodged in his throat. She's beautiful, clear-eyed and straight in her chair. Her skin is smooth and sun-kissed, and her hair is spun gold as it falls over her shoulders.

 _The last time I saw you, you were wasted and sickly and heartbroken,_ he thinks, and the flowers tremble in his grip.

 _Love nourishes, son,_ his father says, and for an instant, a callused hand rests heavy and warm on his shoulder. _And something tells me she got a lot of love here._

She drops her pod of sugar peas, releases her brakes, and comes around the table. Karl snuffles and raises his head, and then he yawns and stretches and follows her. Toot pauses in his follicular repast, and his crest rises in befuddlement.

"Rosalie," he manages, and his vision blurs. _You're beautiful, and I'm sorry,_ he wants to say, but he can't breathe. He sidles from foot to foot and drops into a crouch in front of her chair. "I-" But it won't come, so he releases a shuddering breath and rests his forehead against hers.

"Leo, darlin'," she murmurs. "You came back."

Another shuddering breath. "I told you I would."

"You did." She smiles.

"I never wanted to leave you, darlin'. I never-"

She leans forward and wraps her arms around his shoulders, and Toot gives a peevish chirp and flaps his wings to maintain his balance. "I know. C'mere, darlin'. I've missed you so much I can't stand it."

He shuffles forward on his knees and buries his face in the crook of her neck. "I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry you were afraid and alone. I'm sorry I wasn't there. I know I should've been; no kind of man breaks his promises, but Jim needed me on the ship," he babbles.

She draws back to meet his gaze, and her eyes are soft and sad inside her face. "You look so tired, honey," she says, and strokes his face.

"That's because he's been so heartsick that he hasn't been sleeping," his mother chimes in, and sidles around him to go to the stove, where several pots steam and bubble. "Or eating," she adds. "He's as skinny as a slat cat."

"Well, we'll fix that."

"We certainly will," his mother agrees, and lifts the lid of the stockpot to survey her mess of greens with a critical eye.

"I'm sorry," he says, because he can never say it enough.

She stops his mouth with a chaste kiss, dry and sweet. He smells sugar peas on her breath. "We'll worry about it later," she says. 

He rocks back on his heels and holds up the bouquet he's been clutching since the shuttle left the bay hours ago. "I brought you these," he says shyly. I thought you might like them."

Her eyes widen. "They're gorgeous." She accepts the bouquet of scarlet blossoms and presses her nose to the fragrant blooms. The petals splay to accommodate her inspection and reveal a flash of silver.

"Sulu helped me grow them," he explains, and runs his fingers through his hair.

"You grew these?"

"It was mostly Sulu. I picked the cuttings and watered them. He did the rest."

She lets her fingertips linger over the soft petals. "Tell him he outdid himself." She sniffs the flowers again and settles them on her lap. "Then again, you selected the cuttings."

"I did."

"Well, come on, get up off your haunches," she says. "You shouldn't have to be squatting in your mama's kitchen."

"You sit yourself right down at that table, Leonard McCoy," his mother orders, and jabs a butter knife at a vacant chair. "You need to eat. Christ have mercy, son."

He rises with a groan. "I'm fine, Mama," he protests. He wants to sit, but he doesn't want to leave Rosalie. He curls his fingers around the armrest of her chair.

"Uh huh," his mother says dubiously.

Rosalie covers his hand with her own, and the contact makes his chest ache.

 _She's here. She's here, and she's okay._ His fingers itch for the bioscanner tucked inside his duffel. He has to be sure. 

She drops her hands to her wheels and spins back to the table with crisp assurance, careful to avoid Karl's paws as he dances around her chair. She's so strong now, toned by months of pushing herself over dirt and grass. Her shoulders have even begun to lose their rounded hunch, and she sits straight and easy. No pain in her eyes or grim tightness to her mouth. Her movements are fluid as she pulls up to the table and reaches for a pea pod. Still uncoordinated, still splay-fingered and meticulous, and her mouth still works idly when she concentrates, but the woman in front of him bears little resemblance to the crabbed, pain-wracked creature he'd pulled from that cryotube.

_You're not just surviving now, breathing to spite a world that didn't care if you lived or died. You're living. My little bird finally knows how it feels to fly._

He collapses into a chair before all the strength runs from his legs.

Rosalie looks up from her painstaking evisceration of pea pods. "You all right, honey?"

There's so much he wants to say, but none of it will come, not in front of his mother, who is listening as she stirs and adjusts and bustles about the kitchen. So he only nods and slides his hand across the table in wordless entreaty.

Rosalie drops the empty pod into a biodegradable bag beside her chair and reaches for his outstretched fingers, and when she raises his hand to her lips and presses them to his knuckles, he knows it will be all right. He's under no illusion that there isn't work to be done or hurt to be soothed, but there will be no vengeful, petty retribution spat into his face or carved from his flesh. There is still love here, and its current runs strong and deep.

He gives her a single nod and squeezes her hand and reaches for a pea pod, and when his mother sets a glass of unsweet tea and a hot, buttered square of her freshly-baked cornbread in front of him, he knows he's truly home.


	2. Mama Knows

The last time Eleanora McCoy saw her son at this table, he was wet-eyed and half-drunk and heartbroken, cast out by his wife and mourning the father he couldn't save. He'd sat in that very chair, clutching a cup of coffee in both hands and blinking at her with the owlish grief of a child.

 _I'm sorry, Mama,_ he said, and listed appreciably to the left. _I'm sorry I couldn't save him._

And what could she say to that? Hadn't she asked exactly that of her youngest boy? She hadn't meant to, of course. No mother worth the title would put such a burden on her son's shoulders even if he was a promising young doctor with a talent for neuroscience. When David had gotten sick, she'd intended to trust the doctors to whom he'd been referred and take things as they came, and she'd told herself as she'd sat in sterile consultation rooms and looked at holograms of David's brain and readouts of various scans run on his nervous system that if this were the road she was meant to walk, then she'd do gracefully. She would love him as well at the end as she had at the beginning, and if he were meant to go, then she would ease him into that eternal night as best she could.

But all those lofty intentions had flown out the window the day the doctors had told her they'd done all they could and sent him home with good-luck wishes and pats on the back and a bag full of hypos and pills to slow the progression of the disease and ease his "discomfort", as they so bloodlessly called it. She'd accepted their thanks and unspoken condolences, and then she'd driven home blind for all the tears in her eyes, white-knuckled and shaking and trying not to drive the truck into a ditch. She'd held herself together until she'd gotten home and chivvied David into a shower he didn't need, and then she'd called Len on the office com.

 _And that was the beginning of the end, wasn't it?_ whispers the mournful voice of her maternal conscience as she watches him take a bite of greens and wash it down with a sip of unsweet tea. _That was the call that set your boy on the road to Starfleet and the vast desolation of space, where he sleeps in a floating tin can and washes with sonic vibrations and sets his teeth into reconstituted air. You didn't know that then, lost to your heartbroken panic; if you had, you never would've made that call, would've called George instead, George, with all the medical skill of a turnip, who would've done nothing but enfold you in his embrace and tell you it would be all right. Or better yet, you wouldn't have called anyone. You would've stood at the sink or sat at the kitchen table and crammed your apron into your mouth and cried and screamed into fabric you couldn't hurt until you pulled yourself together._

_But you did know Len would come. Good, sweet, obedient Len, who loved his mama and idolized his daddy, and who possessed a healer's hands and an angel's heart. Len, with his newly-minted medical degree and his idealism and his dogged determination, and in the back of your mind and the selfish cloister of your heart reserved only for David, you hoped he could work a miracle._

_And he did come, your boy. He came with anguish and concern in his eyes and love and determination in his heart, and he tried. He tried so hard, tried himself to blood and bone and hard, pithy nothingness. He read the reports and scrutinized the lab results and ran clandestine tests during his coffee break at the fledgling practice he'd set up near the local hospital. He examined his father, and now that you think on it with the cold, worthless clarity of hindsight, what a torment that must've been for him to see his father that way, dull-eyed and confused and clutching the unraveling threads of his memory with traitorous fingers. As far as Len was concerned, his father was the greatest man to ever walk the earth, strong and fair and kind, a superhero in biballs and chambray work shirts. You should have let him keep that perception, let him remember his father as the towering figure from whom he'd learned kindness and fairness and simple, human decency and as the man who'd given him piggyback rides to the stables and milking barn on Saturday mornings, but you were grasping and desperate to save the man you'd loved for almost thirty-five years. So when it came down to your husband's mind or your son's heart, you chose your husband._

_And lost them both._

_Len did the best he could, a damn sight better than most men would have done, you wager, and he kept going long after hope was gone. He spent days on end at his practice, holed up in his tiny office with pot after pot of coffee and poring over lab results and medical journals and synthesizing experimental medicines. When he wasn't hunched over his padd and squinting at bioscanner readouts, he was sitting with David on the front porch and trying to coax memories from his fading mind._

You remember when you took me and George to Stone Mountain, Daddy? _he'd ask hopefully, and watch his father carefully from the corner of his eye._

_In the beginning, David would usually answer that of course he did, and Len would relax and offer him a sunny grin, and they'd sit in those old rockers and watch the sun set. David would scratch the worn toe of his workboots, and Len would absently rub his knee and sip unsweet tea, and they'd talk until the sun slipped below the horizon and the katydids took up their nocturnal song. Sometimes, David would rest his hand on Len's shoulder, and for just a moment, before Len's heart remembered his age, his eyes would close at the simple pleasure of his father's touch. On those nights, you could fool yourself into believing things would come right in the end. You'd look out the living room window and see them sitting together in the deepening gloom, and their muffled laughter would drift inside._

It's all right now, _you'd think, relieved._ Dave had a bad turn, but he's on the mend. The medicines are finally working, or maybe he just needed some time with Len. Whatever it was, it's gone, passed over like a bad storm.

_But it never lasted. There would be good days and sometimes whole weeks when David felt like himself again, lucid and spry and hopeful, but then Len would come by for supper, fresh off work and still dressed in his doctor's whites. He'd come up the porch steps and sit beside his father with a smile._

Evenin', Daddy, _he'd say happily._

 _And David would look at him with vague, clouded eyes._ What're you doin' home, son? Shouldn't you be in school? _As though he had no recollection of sitting in the auditorium and whooping with joy when his boy graduated from med school with high honors and earned the honorific of Doctor. As though his arms had forgotten the exuberant hug in which he'd enfolded him when he'd come through the crowd with his mortarboard in one hand and his diploma in the other. As though he had never seen the tassel that hung on the mantel._

 _And just like that, Len's eyes would darken with sorrow._ I'm a doctor now, Daddy, _he'd say softly._ Don't you remember? _Pleading, and your heart would cry out with a mother's anguish._ You were there when I graduated.

 _David would blink at him, face slack with incomprehension._ Was I? _His brows would furrow in pained concentration. Then his expression would clear._ My son, the doctor, _he'd say proudly._ Well, come on and sit a spell. Your mother's seeing to supper. _He'd gesture to the empty rocking chair._ Did I tell you about the prize calf George turned the other day?

No, Daddy, _he'd reply, though he'd heard it before, and ever the dutiful son, he'd sit down and listen like it was the first time._

_By September, it was clear that David was never coming back. His bad days far outnumbered his good, and he'd grown querulous and spiteful. The man who once kissed you every morning as he spun you around the kitchen now looked at you with sullen eyes and snapped at you to hurry with his goddamn breakfast; he'd never spoken a hard word to you in thirty-five years, and he'd certainly never cursed you. It was as stunning and painful as an unexpected blow, and you could only stand at the stove and suck in a breath and tell him it'd be ready in a minute, honey, while the tears ran down your face._

_Then one day just before Thanksgiving, the man who'd given you his name and two fine sons couldn't remember your name. He came downstairs, frail and unsteady on his feet and shuffled into the kitchen as he always did, and he kissed your cheek when you brought him his breakfast. You had just sat down to your own plate when he looked at you with his forkful of hashbrowns halfway to his mouth and asked,_ Who are you? _As though he hadn't just kissed your cheek. As though he hadn't slept beside you for thirty-five years and mapped every inch of you with his hands and mouth. As if he'd never helped you walk the floors with a colicky baby at three in the morning or danced with you beneath the stars._

It's me, darlin', _was all you could manage around the anguish lodged in your throat like a lump of cold biscuit._

 _He scowled at you. Then he shook his head and shoveled hashbrowns into his mouth._ Pass the syrup, _he grunted, boorish and blunt and not the man who'd charmed your heart away._

_You passed him the syrup, and then you fled the table and called Len, your faithful little crutch. You should've called George instead. He was closer, and Len had been running himself into the ground in pursuit of a miracle, but it was Len you wanted, with his sweet heart and soft voice and tireless healer's hands. George was your first, but Len was your favorite, his father's son and your little shadow._

_And just like he always did, your boy came running. Try as he might, he couldn't draw his father out of the darkness, not with medicine, and not with his touch or the sound of his voice. The David you knew and loved had disappeared into himself for the last time, and there was nothing left to do but wait for his body to follow his mind. Once Len got David settled down in the living room, you went onto the porch and cried, eyes squeezed shut against the mocking, melancholy splendor of autumn._

_Len came out and wrapped his arms around you from behind._ I'm sorry, Mama, _he murmured, unaware that he would echo those words a few months later, drunker than a lord and listing in his chair._

_You should've put an end to it then, released him from the task to which your desperation had set him, but you were too shocked and heartsick to do anything but turn into him and cry and clutch at him with arms that suddenly felt old and brittle._

I'm losing my David, _you wailed, and sobbed against his chest. You snarled your fingers in the fabric of his flannel shirt and pressed your cheek against its familiar nap and howled your sorrow into your youngest boy._

I'm trying, _he said._ I'm trying. 

_You lost your David, and he lost his Pamela. She tried, bless her heart. When David first took sick, she came to spell you while you ran to the grocery store or the pharmacy for more medicine. She read to him when he was lucid enough to hear it, and when he wasn't, she helped with the cooking and cleaning before she went home to see to her own husband. It was a grueling schedule for anyone, let alone a newlywed who hadn't even had the chance to shake the wedding rice from her hair, and who should've been basking in the glow of married life and making babies with her devoted young husband. You never should've put so much on her young shoulders--you or Len--but grief makes you selfish, and you told yourself that once David was better, there would be plenty of time for Len to mend fences and start his own family. Love endures, after all._

_It was bullshit and foolishness, and plenty of it, and you should've known better. Love endures, sure enough, but only if it's been nurtured and given the chance to settle its roots deep in the hearts of those who hold it. You and David had had your share of adversity and lean times, but there had been plenty of good years, too, and memories of laughter and joy to sustain you through the hard times. You'd had a honeymoon period of continued courtship and frequent loving in every corner of the house, and you'd had the chance to know each other inside and out, to develop a shared history that bound your hearts as tightly as your bodies._

_Pamela had been denied all of that. When she should've been the apple of her husband's eye, she'd been a mere rueful afterthought on the periphery of his life, cast aside in favor of the preservation of a life already well-lived. When she should've been giggling and playing slap-and-tickle under the covers and imagining a future full of babies and family suppers, she was left to her own devices, sleeping alone in a bed meant for two and wrapping up suppers gone cold for a husband who seldom came home to eat them(and you know just how seldom he came home because he was too often here, sitting up late into the night with David or falling asleep sitting up on the couch because he was going over his notes for the thousandth time, or at the clinic, running meaningless tests in search of a last-minute reprieve.)._

_You realized what was happening and tried to turn him aside. Hell, you even kicked him out one August night and ordered him to go home, but Len is stubborn as an old mule when he sets his mind and heart to something, and he went to the clinic instead to hunch over his notes and sleep at his desk. Pamela was left to wait for a husband who never came home. You could only watch as the kind, vivacious woman Len had whirled so exuberantly through the rose garden that spring became withdrawn and silent, a slump-shouldered crone with shadows beneath her eyes who trudged from room to room and fiddled restively with the small, golden band on her finger._

_She made one last effort that Thanksgiving. She turned up on the doorstep with an armful of groceries and a mouthful of nervous chatter and did her damnedest to inject the house with some semblance of holiday cheer. She bustled into the kitchen and spent the better part of a day cooking a meal with all the fixings--turkey and cornbread stuffing and mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce and pecan and pumpkin pie. Peach cobbler. The house smelled of rosemary and sage and roasting turkey, like home and family._

_It was beautiful. And no one ate a goddamn bit of it. Everyone was too busy staring at the empty chair at the head of the table, too aware of that dreadful absence to appreciate the gifts that remained._

_You've always thought your boy's marriage ended with the scrape of Pamela's chair as she pushed away from the table. It was tired and forlorn, a melancholy rasp of surrender, and she'd didn't look at anyone as she volunteered to start cleaning up. She just gathered plates and stared at the empty places they left behind and carried them into the kitchen without a word. She needed a gentle hand and a kind word then, but she got neither, and while you've come to terms with David's passing, you've never quite forgiven yourself for who you became while he was dying._

_You don't think Len has, either._

_Pamela gave up after that. She never came to the house again except to pay her respects at David's wake. Two weeks after his father was in the ground, she tossed Len out on his ass with nothing but a duffel bag and the clothes on his back, and that's how he ended up at this table at three in the morning with whiskey on his breath and shame all over his face._

I'm sorry, Mama. I'm sorry I couldn't save him. _Clutching that coffee cup like it was the only thing holding him up._

Oh, sugar, _you said, and came around the table to cradle his head to your stomach, and your boy broke, twenty-seven going on three._

I'm sorry, Mama, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, sorry, sorry. _Over and over again, wretched and ashamed and sure he'd lost your love._

_You realized what you'd done then, but it was too late. In trying to save your husband, you'd nearly destroyed your boy, and all you could do was rock him back and forth and feel his fractures grind and shift beneath your hands._

Oh, my boy, _you thought, and carded your fingers through his hair as he sobbed and snuffled into your nightgown._ It's all right, honey. It wasn't your fault. You did the best you could, baby.

But Daddy's still gone, _he said in a small, strangled voice, and your heart shattered inside your chest._

 _He never forgave himself for the empty place at your table or the pale band of flesh around his ring finger where his wedding band used to be. He withdrew, turned inward, turned_ on _himself, and his cheeks got gaunt, and his eyes got red-rimmed and hollow. When he came to visit, which was far less often than it used to be, you smelled booze and spearmint on his breath. He was rotting from the inside out, and all the hugs in the world couldn't stop his downward spiral._

_Then Pamela took him for everything, including his pride, and you hit your knees in the middle of the kitchen and prayed that you wouldn't come out to the barn one morning and find him swinging from the rafters with his tassel in his hand and his med school diploma pinned to his chest. You've never been happier to get a call saying he was alive and enlisted in Starfleet. You were worried, to be sure, and heartsick to have him so far from home, but at least it was a plan, an act of survival, however grudging and desperate. People who enlisted in Starfleet didn't drive their trucks into bridge abutments or eat the business end of their phasers, and maybe getting away from the house where his father died and his wife forgot her love for him would help him shake the ghosts he couldn't seem to drown._

_And damned if it didn't seem to work. He was gruffer than you remembered, more taciturn, but you heard the pride in his voice when he talked about his studies and his grades and his clinic hours, about the patients he helped. His shoulders straightened, and his eyes sparkled, and his step regained its confident spring. Sometimes he called you on the com and hummed while he puttered around his dorm and told you about his friend, Jim, and oh, how it did your heart good to know that he was reaching for something other than the bottle, and that he had someone to look out for and to look out for him. Of course, that was before you knew Jim Kirk was a reckless, lunatic maverick who'd have Len jumping off cliffs and clutching handrails in sickbay while his ship plummeted to Earth, but it hardly mattered. Len wouldn't hear a word against him. He made your boy happy, and for you, that was enough._

_You've never been prouder than the day he graduated Starfleet, resplendent in his cadet reds. So happy he was, and proud, too, though he's too modest to admit it. He was top of his class in the medical track, and you couldn't help but sing out when they called his name. His lips twitched, and a helpless blush rose in his cheeks as he strode across the room to accept his officers' pin. So much a man, healthy and robust, and so much like his father as he shook the senior officer's hand with a brisk, confident pump that you thought your heart would burst._

_He met your eyes as the officer affixed the pin to his collar._ I did it, Mama, _his eyes said._

Yes, you did, baby, _you thought, and clapped until your palms stung, and for just a moment before he turned smartly on his heel and returned to his seat, you saw David in his face._ We did it, sweetheart, _you thought, and blinked back tears._ We've made a fine, young man, and I couldn't have done it without you.

_Then he went tearing across the galaxy with Jim. Some of the stories he told you liked to have turned your hair white, and you're not sure you want to know about the ones he's kept from you. There have been a few rough spots, like that godawful business with the Khan Synthesis that nearly saw him bounced out of Starfleet, but by and large, Len has made a fine home for himself among the stars and created a family of which he is unapologetically proud and fiercely protective. George is and always will be his brother by blood, but his crewmates are his family by choice, and there's nothing he wouldn't do to keep them safe._

_There was just one thing missing from his patchwork kin, and so your ears pricked up in a hurry when he mentioned a woman he'd pulled out of the stars. A time traveler, as it turned out, a woman who had last walked the earth two hundred and forty years ago. A patch of earth not far from here, as it so happened. She was a Southern belle abandoned to the ages. Even her name evoked images of colonnaded plantation houses and hoop skirts and sprawling kudzu vines. Rosalie._

She's just a patient, Mama, _he'd say when you prodded him about the young woman who had so captured his attention, and maybe he'd meant it in the beginning, when she'd been nothing but skin and bones in need of mending, but as time went on, he'd spoken less of the diagnoses and the assessments and the daily paces through which he put her and more about what she'd said or done when she wasn't in the harness and struggling to rebuild herself one toe-touch at a time. Vinyl mats and hand cycles had given way to cooking sessions in the communal galley and strolls along the promenade, and somewhere along the way, she ceased to be "my patient" and became simply "Rosalie"._

If I didn't know better, I'd say you've taken a shine to her, _you noted one night during the weekly com call._

She's my patient, Mama, _came the predictable reply, but a faint blush blossomed in his cheeks and across the bridge of his nose._

Mmm, _you agreed sedately._ That doesn't change the fact that you wish she was something different.

 _Len was quiet for a long time, his hands folded across his belly._ I can't, _he said quietly, and the wistfulness in it made your throat constrict._ I'm not what she needs.

_But he did. You turned on your padd early Christmas morning to find those pictures from Risa. One look, and you knew his heart was gone. It was in his eyes, the awe and rhapsodic devotion with which he was looking at her. You'd seen that look before a thousand times across the breakfast table. It was the look that had given you two children and thirty-five good years and a hole in your heart you've never been able to fill, especially when the mornings dawn cold and there's no one on the other side of the bed to warm your aching old bones._

_It's the look he's giving her now, as a matter of fact,_ she realizes. _He hasn't taken his eyes off her since he first clapped them onto her. Poor thing's been eating one-handed, too, because he won't let go._

"Len, honey, turn her loose so she can eat."

Len blinks in surprise and reluctantly disentangled his fingers. "Sorry, darlin'."

Rosalie shakes her head. "Nothing to be sorry for." She makes no move to use her liberated hand, and when it doesn't immediately creep toward her plate, Len captures it again.

"Lord have mercy," she mutters, and shakes her head, but it's fond. She's pleased to see him eating with gusto. He's downed three squares of cornbread, a helping of greens, and one of buttered mashed potatoes liberally dusted with black pepper, and if she's not mistaken, he's working his way through his sixth steak finger.

 _Good. Boy needs to eat._ She takes a sip of sweet tea. "It's good to see you, son," she says.

He tears his gaze from Rosalie and fixes her with a soft smile. "It's good to be home, Mama." He sinks the tines of his fork into the mossy hillock of his greens. "The place looks good. George whitewash it for you?"

She nods. "He and the Beaumont boy."

He takes a bite of greens, chews, and wipes his lips with his napkin. "Another eighteen months, and I'll be around to help you if you need it."

She quirks an eyebrow in surprise. "You getting out of Starfleet, then?"

He gives a one-shouldered shrug. "Just considering my options, is all," he says noncommittally, but he casts a furtive, sidelong glance at Rosalie, who is trying to corral greens onto her fork with one hand. 

_Oh, honey._

"Besides, the ship'll go in for repairs and upgrades as soon as she gets in. Probably won't go out for two months, maybe three. And I could always request a planetside transfer." Another clandestine glance at Rosalie, who is still in tenacious pursuit of her collard greens. He picks up his piece of cornbread and uses its edge as a buttress against which to trap Rosalie's fugitive comestibles.

"Thanks, sugar," she says, and claims her prize. Len's answer is an amiable grunt and a kiss to her temple.

And in that moment of unthinking affection and companionable symbiosis, she knows. Someday--and probably sooner rather than later--she'll get another com call, another picture of Len and his precious Rosalie. Maybe it'll be from Risa again, that tropical paradise that stands in for hearth and home while he's out exploring the universe with a family she knows only by name. He'll be looking at her with that same quiet, yearning adoration, but this time the gleam in his eyes will be matched by the glitter of the ring on her finger. 

_You found her, didn't you, sweetheart? Your safe harbor._

_She's hardly what you expected after everything he'd told you about her. You expected a petite beauty with rosy lips and golden hair and an abundance of grace. What you got was a tiny, fine-boned creature with thin, pink lips and lustrous blonde hair and melancholy blue eyes older than her years. And she was in a wheelchair, to boot. You should've figured on it given what Len had said about her diagnosis, but somehow the reality of it had sailed clear over your head. You did a double-take when you saw her sitting there with Len kneeling beside her in the purple sand, his skin glossy with sunscreen and his grin as bright as the sun at his back._

You never told me she was in a wheelchair, honey, _you mentioned during your next com call._

 _Len's mouth curved in a boyish grin._ Sorry. Didn't think it mattered. _He ran his fingers through his hair._ I guess I figured you'd know.

Does it bother you?

 _He shrugged._ Don't see why it should. She's Rosalie; the wheels under her ass just get her where she needs to be.

_And that was Len's first and last word on the wheels under his love's ass. He never mentioned her chair again, and truth be told, it made you unspeakably proud even if your mother's mind did burn with questions about the possibility of grandbabies if it came down to it. You've got three from George, and you love them to death, but you've always dreamed of holding Len's child in your arms and seeing his kind soul passed on to another generation. So you kept your questions to yourself. It was enough that she made him happy, that your taciturn boy smiled every time her name passed his lips._

_And then came that com call in the middle of the night._

They took my Rosalie, _were the first words out of his mouth, and you could only blink in sleep-addled stupefaction at his stricken, tear-stained face._

Who took her? _you asked fuzzily._ Honey, what are you talking about?

They took my Rosalie, _he repeated, and his voice cracked._ The Ventaxian elect wouldn't come on board while she was here, and we needed the pig-ignorant bastard for negotiations with the Ferengi, so Jim-Jim made me give her up.

 _You hadn't the foggiest idea bout Ventaxians or Ferengis, but Rosalie you understood._ What? Why? 

_Len's bloodshot eyes watered, and he covered his trembling lips with his hand._ She's dyin', Mama, _he moaned, and his chest hitched._ I took her down to that godforsaken planet before I realized what close-minded, self-righteous idiots they were, and she picked up some bug in the quarantine zone. Ordinarily, it's a just a nuisance to humans, but Rosalie... _A strangled wheeze escaped him._ Something in her system just went berserk. I've been trying to figure it out, but... _A helpless shudder._ She's dyin', Mama, and I can't do a damn thing about it.

Oh, honey, _you murmured._ I'm so sorry.

I got her stable, and M'Benga got her into a cryotube for transport to Emory, but I don't-I don't think-

 _And then your boy broke._ I tried, Mama. I tried so hard. _He leaned forward and put his head on his desk and cried._

_It was his father all over again, but this time you were nine thousand light years away and couldn't offer him so much as the meager comfort of your arms. You could only watch as his shoulders shook and he mumbled incomprehensibly into his desk about no-good sons of bitches and broken promises._

I'm sorry, sweetheart. _It was a mantra sent down the line, repeated around the tight knot in your throat, hot and raw and utterly useless, and you wished like hell that you could reach through that com screen and take his pain into yourself, hold it against your heart like you once held him. But looking and wishing were all you could do._

_Which was why, when he called you in the middle of the night some three months later with that same pinched, miserable, grief-stricken face and begged you to get his Rosalie out of the hospital before the social workers transferred her to indigent services and shuffled her off to some Federation-run bivouac for the elderly and impaired, you swallowed your misgivings and drove ninety minutes to Emory University Hospital to spring a woman you'd never met. You had no idea how you were going to get her into the truck, let alone the house, with its steps and narrow staircase to the second floor, but you figured you'd cross that bridge when you came to it._

_She was a small, pale slip of a thing, the woman who held your son's heart. Ninety pounds if she was breathing, and grey as the slip she was wearing._

Hasn't said a word since she came out of her coma, _said the chirpy, young nurse who led you to the sunroom where they left their more mobile patients to wander under the watchful eyes of patrolling aides and the duty nurse, who oversaw the room from a raised observation pod with transparent, Lexan walls._ Don't expect to get much out of her.

_She was sitting in a patch of sunlight that spilled through the floor-to-ceiling windows that made up the rear wall, and sure enough, she didn't make a peep when the nurse approached and introduced you. She did turn her head, though, and though her face was bloodless and expressionless, her gaze was alert and coolly-assessing._

Rosalie, my name is Eleanora, _you said, and held out your hand._

_Surprise flickered in her eyes at the use of her name, but she said nothing. After a moment of cool scrutiny, she held out her hand and inclined her head._

Pleased to make your acquaintance, _you said, and then you turned to the bubbly nurse, who hovered over your shoulder._ Give us a minute, would you, sugar?

I sure will, _she answered._ Rosalie, you be good for Ms. Latham, now, you hear? _she admonished, as though she were an obstreperous toddler and not a grown woman._

Or like she was a dementia patient, _you thought, but that wasn't a road you wanted to travel, so you pushed the thought aside._

_Rosalie scowled, and her ruffled pique reminded you so much of Len that you had to bite the inside of your cheek._

She might not say much, but the wheels are definitely turning in that head.

_You were too old to crouch, so you sidled closer to her chair and clasped your hands behind your back with one hand encircling the opposite wrist. It's a posture Len inherited from you, and her eyes drifted to your arms._

Pretty view, _you remarked. It wasn't; it was, in fact, a small courtyard of concrete and cheap slate dominated by a fountain that shot water into the air in sluggish, dispirited spurts. Here and there, patients and haggard relatives sat on wrought-iron benches or meandered aimlessly through its dismal confines._

_Rosalie snorted. She regarded you with shuttered blue eyes, and you could see the wheels turning in her head as she assessed your intelligence._

Is this how you spend most of your time, staring out the window at this horde of nearly-deads? I've seen better hind ends at the annual cattle auction.

_She said nothing, but her lips twitched._

What if I said I could offer you a much better view?

_Her lips pursed in a dubious moue._

How would you like to finish your recuperation on a forty-acre dairy farm?

_She froze, and her fingers curled around the armrests of her chair._

There's plenty of movement behind those shutters now, _you thought, and said,_ I know it's not ideal, and it's certainly not fancy, but I guarantee you'll have better views, a decent meal, and plenty of fresh air. I don't know how these doctors expect a body to get well when they're cooped up all the time, breathing in others' sickness. It's like putting your septic tank next to the well and expecting your water not to taste like shit.

_A surprised squawk escaped her._

I know you don't know me from Adam, but- _You lowered your voice to little more than a whisper._ -Dr. McCoy is worried sick about you.

_For a moment, her dispassionate facade buckled. She recoiled as though pinched, and her chest hitched. Her bottom lip quivered._

Bo-? _A single inexplicable syllable, surprise and longing and a deep and abiding hurt, and oh, Lord, something dark and terrible had happened here, something that had driven her to intractable silence. Then her expression hardened, and the mask slipped back into place. She shook her head, obdurate and dead-eyed._

I can't make you do anything you don't have a mind to, _you said._ If you want to stay here, then so be it. I'm not begging. But you should know that you can't stay here forever. If you don't find your feet soon, they'll refer you to Indigent Services and you'll be shuttled off to a long-term facility where you'll see nothing but this for the rest of your life. That doesn't seem like any kind of life to me, especially not for someone as smart as Dr. McCoy says you are.

_She recoiled from the name with a sharply-indrawn breath, head turned and eyes squeezed shut, and you wondered again just what had passed between them before she left and took your son's heart with her._

Maybe it's not ideal. Maybe ideal and what it is aren't even kissing cousins, but is this really what you want to see for the rest of your life? _You gestured to the window, where you were treated to the scintillating view of a man's pasty ass peeking insolently from the flap of his hospital johnnie._

_She hesitated, torn between painful past and unknown future._

You stay here, you're looking at fifty years of a life lived for you by bureaucrats with agendas and tidy little timetables. I don't know what happened between you and m-Dr. Mccoy; that's your business. What I do know is that if you come with me, you get to decide what the rest of your life is going to be.

_So it was that you ended up driving down the road with a wheelchair and a pair of forearm crutches in the bed of the truck and a tired, broken woman huddled in the passenger seat. The suits at Emory tried to fuss about it, tried to claim they couldn't just go turning patients over to strangers, but while Rosalie's mouth might've temporarily abdicated its position, her mind had not, and she tapped out a series of blistering notes on her padd that, as David would have so eloquently put it, jerked a knot in their tails and had them shoving her out the door without so much as a by your leave. Apparently, citation of the Federation Bill of Rights and the Universal Patient Code has a powerful effect on paternalistic blowhards._

_She didn't say a word until the hospital was twenty minutes in the rearview mirror._

How do you know Dr. McCoy? _The dry creak of dusty hinges._

Len's my boy, _you replied, and spared her a sidelong glance as you passed a rattling, old Bronco on a two-lane stretch of blacktop._

 _She huffed._ You call him Len?

From the time he was in shortpants.

 _Another huff._ I call him Leo. Called, _she amended softly._ I called him Leo. _And just before she turned to study the flat expanse of countryside that rolled past the window, you saw the glint of tears in her eyes._

_She came to you and yours with nothing but her padd, the dingy scrubs she was wearing, and the gown she'd been wearing in the cryotube, and you realized very quickly that the farmhouse was inadequate to the needs of someone in a wheelchair. It was a comedy of sweating and swearing getting her up the three steps up to the porch and the front door, and while she could use her crutches to slalom through the bathroom door like a genteel drunk, getting into the tub was a recipe for undignified disaster. You dug up the old handheld sonic shower you'd used for David in his last days, when he was too wracked with pain and too far gone in delirium to be moved. Crutches or not, she couldn't climb the stairs to the bedrooms on the second floor, so you made up a nest for her on the couch in the parlor. Hardly a tenable solution, but it was the best you could do under the circumstances, and Rosalie, bless her soul, never said a peep about it. She made do for two weeks, until George came by and set up a small room in the barn, with a cot and a privacy screen and space for her chair and a small footlocker. You were mortified, making a guest sleep in the barn, but you were bound by the limitations of architecture, and at least it afforded her a measure of privacy._

_She was polite and quiet as a mouse, a shadow that flitted on the periphery of your life. You'd hardly know she was there if it weren't for the extra dishes in the sink after dinner, and half the time, there wasn't even that because she washed them, propped against the sink with the rounded edge of the counter cutting into her belly and scrubbing away with a sudsy sponge. Len was fit to be tied when you told him about it. It was too dangerous, he said, and he painted doomsday scenarios of her slipping and cracking her skull on the edge of the counter. You told her to stop putting herself to the unnecessary trouble, but she wouldn't hear it, and soon enough, you learned to leave her to it. What Len didn't know wouldn't hurt him._

_God bless his soul, he did his best to look after her from light years away. When you casually mentioned that Rosalie was getting awfully stiff now that the Loxtan pills they'd sent her home with ran out, he lost his mind._

What do you mean, pills? _he demanded._ She's supposed to be on the hypo form.

Well, I know, sugar. She tried to tell them that, but they didn't want anyone but a doctor administering it, they said. I guess they don't trust a cripple and an old woman with anything stronger than an aspirin.

Those ass-covering jackasses, _he spat._ Leaving her to suffer because they're too goddamned lazy to get some pre-loaded vials.

They've got plenty of other patients, _you pointed out._

It takes five minutes! _he thundered. He shook his head and let out a huff of sardonic laughter._ Five goddamned minutes, _he muttered._ Lazy, incompetent sons of- _He stopped._ I'll take care of it, _he said brusquely._

_You were sitting on the porch two days later when a courier pulled into the drive and delivered a package addressed to Rosalie. The driver, a skinny kid with a chin full of peachfuzz, came up the steps like he'd made a mess of his pants and refused to make eye contact. He was gone before Rosalie made the door, and never mind the required signature. It wasn't until Rosalie opened the box that the penny dropped, and when it did, you laughed your belly sore._

_Len had made good on his promise. Inside the box were thirty vials of Loxtan, a hypo, and a note, as well as a certified prescription from one Leonard H. McCoy, M.D. No doubt he'd gone on the warpath the minute your weekly com call ended, and based on the courier's reaction, he'd kept chewing until he met bone._

He loves you, honey, _you thought as Rosalie held the box on her lap and stared wordlessly at the contents. She brushed her hair behind her ear and reached out to finger the edge of the neatly-folded note, and her eyes softened. Then her twitching jaw set, and she closed the box, the note unread atop the rows of vials. She turned and carried it into the house, and when you followed her inside a few minutes later, the box was on the kitchen table and short a vial._

_Of the note there was no sign, but soft, smothered sobs drifted from beneath the bathroom door, and when she hobbled out on her crutches a few minutes later, her eyes were red and swollen._

You all right, honey? _you asked._

Yes'm, _she answered thickly as she executed a crisp plant and pivot and settled into her waiting chair._ I'll be along to help you with supper in a minute. 

_She never said boo about what was in that note, nor would she talk about Len. Whenever you broached the subject, she offered a polite, distant smile and said,_ Yes, ma'am, he's a fine doctor, and I'm grateful for all that he's done. _Then she would turn the topic to other matters or hum noncommittally when you waxed rhapsodic about his childhood exploits or professional accomplishments. She would never speak of him as the man that she had known and so clearly loved on Risa, and she refused to look at the countless photos of him you kept in electronic albums stored on the bookcase. Whoever he had been to her before she'd gone into that cryotube, he was just Dr. McCoy now, and she had no interest in baby pictures of her former doctor._

_It all came to a head one Sunday evening. You were at the counter, cutting biscuit dough and prattling happily about Len's latest doings._

He says the Ventaxians and Ferengi are still going 'round and 'round in their negotiations, _you told her, and pressed the chilled, metal cutter straight down into the dough._

So, the same as last week, then? _she murmured, and dredged a catfish fillet in cornmeal from her customary place at the table._

Says it could be weeks before they finish hammering it out.

 _She hummed softly._ He'd know, I suppose. _She shook the excess from a fillet and set it aside._ 'Course, he said that a few weeks ago, as I recall. _She dabbed her fingers on a paper towel and reached for another fillet._

Apparently, the Ventaxians are ones for talking.

They are that, _she agreed, and the fillet descended into the bowl of cornmeal from the boon of her fingers._

He was asking about you again.

_A noncommital grunt, and something inside you snapped. Here was this woman living in your home and benefiting from your son's long-distance devotion, and she couldn't be bothered to give him the time of day. You let go of your biscuit cutter and wiped your hands on a nearby dishrag._

What's that supposed to mean? _you demanded._

 _She looked up from her work, one eyebrow raised in surprise. She shrugged._ It means I'm fine. He's done his due diligence as a doctor.

 _You threw down the dish towel with a snap._ He's not asking as a doctor, and you know it. _When her gaze returned to her bowl of cornmeal and the catfish fillet buried in its depths, you asked,_ Do you love my son?

 _Her head snapped up, and her eyes flashed with indignation._ I don't believe that's any of your concern, _she said coolly._

The hell it ain't, _you retorted flatly, and crossed your arms, and recognition flickered in Rosalie's eyes._ You've been eating my food and sleeping under my roof for nigh on two months now, and you've done nothing but ignore and insult my son.

 _She blinked at you in thunderstruck astonishment._ I've done no such thing, _she protested._

Then why haven't you said a word to him when he calls?

That's your time. I don't want to intrude.

Bullshit, _you spat, hard and stinging as a slap._ You won't even look at him. I saw those pictures, girl, the ones from Risa. I know you loved him once, so what in the hell happened?

 _Her chin wobbled, but when she spoke, her voice was steady and bitter as gall._ Yes, well, the doctor has made his feelings for me quite clear.

Yes, he has, you stupid, willful child! _you roared, and she jumped. You crossed to her side of the table in three strides and jerked the armrest of her chair so hard that she would've toppled over sideways if you hadn't been there to act as a bulwark in a flour-dusted apron._ Do you think he sends every patient under his care to do their recovering in his childhood home? _You turned her to face you and curled your hands around her armrests._ Do you? _you demanded._

No, ma'am, but-

But nothing. Everything my son has ever loved is in this house. My boy's heart is in this house. He sent you here because he loves you. For God's sake, he's still trying to love you from nine thousand light years away, or have you forgotten about those little blue vials he sends once a month, never mind that you're technically not his patient? _Your face was inches from hers._ You're here because my boy loves you, and if you don't believe that, Miss Walker, then you can get your put-upon ass out of that chair and out of this house, because you don't deserve either.

_You fell silent, shoulders heaving and temples throbbing and mouth sour with adrenaline. Then you straightened and spun on your heel and sought refuge in your biscuits. She never said a word. It was a strained affair at the dinner table that night, and the biscuits were chewy and tasteless and stuck to the back of your teeth like putty. No help from Rosalie that night. She ate in absolute silence, pale and pinched and stolid as an old mule as she shoveled fish into her mouth and chased it with a sip of tea, and when she was finished, she left her plate on the table and retreated to the barn via the detachable ramp George built for her. She was still silent when she turned up to breakfast the following morning, but later that afternoon, you found her in the parlor, curled on the sofa and scrolling through the photo album._

_She paused on a picture of Len in his cadet reds._ God, he was gorgeous, _she murmured, and trailed her finger over his virtual cheek._

Always was. He was quite the prize at the senior prom. Smart _and_ handsome.

 _A wistful smile._ And sweet. And charming as the devil.

Trust me, honey, there is nothing of the devil in him. Sometimes I think the good Lord did him a disservice giving him a heart so big.

Don't I know it. _She shook her head and pressed a knuckle to her upper lip._ He was the first thing I saw when I woke up. Then he opened his mouth, and he sounded like home. _She blinked to clear her eyes._ I miss him. Like hell.

He's trying, honey, I promise you. I don't know what happened up there, but I know it hasn't changed how he feels about you.

Please don't hurt my boy, _you pleaded silently, and in your mind's eye, you saw him crying at his desk, shoulders quaking with his muffled misery._ This world has already done more harm to him than he ever did to it. Be patient. Give him a chance, and I promise you it'll be worth it.

I tried, Mama. I tried so hard.

Now here he sits a month later, eating a decent meal and using his cornbread as a buttress at the disposal of his lady fair in pursuit of her greens as though it were the most natural thing in the world. He's tired, but there's color in his cheeks and a smile on his face, and his thumb is gently stroking Rosalie's knuckles. No heartache now, or shame, only relief and quiet happiness.

 _Please don't hurt my boy,_ she thinks again.

Len raises an eyebrow at Rosalie in wordless inquiry, and when she nods, he returns his slice of cornbread to his plate and uses it to sop the juice from his collards. "Speaking of George," he says in a companionable drawl, and takes a bite of cornbread. "What's he up to?"

"Same," she answers, and puts down her fork. "He and his want to stop by and see you, maybe have a cookout. I told them to at least wait until the day after tomorrow before he set the horde loose on you. Figured that'd give you time to rest."

 _And court,_ she adds.

He groans. "He's got three now, if I recall."

"And they're growing like weeds. "Hannah is excited to meet her Uncle Leo."

Rosalie pauses in mid-sip. "She's never met you?"

Len wipes his mouth and burps softly into the crumpled napkin. "She's only four. I was at the Academy when she was born. Thomas was about two. I figure the only one who really remembers me is Carlene. She was five when I left."

"And you're her favorite uncle," Eleanora says.

Len rolls his eyes and takes a sip of tea. "I'm her only uncle," he reminds her.

"And she adores the ground you walk on."

Len grunts, but a grin tugs at the corner of his mouth.

"How long you here for?"

He pushes his plate away. "Jim figures he can get away with a week."

She furrows her brow. "'Get away with?'"

He shifts in his chair. "Technically, the _Enterprise_ isn't scheduled to be here for another five months, but Jim made up some bunkum about a study on the aftereffects of Nero's red-matter drill on planetary mineral deposits. Officially, I'm here to collect core samples."

"But the drill's epicenter was in San Francisco. And you're a doctor, not a geologist."

Rosalie splutters into her tea.

"I didn't say it was a foolproof plan," he says, and he lets go of Rosalie's hand to brush his fingertips down her spine. "You all right, darlin'?"

She nods and sets down her tea. "I'm fine. Just went down the wrong pipe." She reaches for her napkin.

"It's good enough that Starfleet MPs won't be busting in here to arrest me for desertion and dereliction of duty. I'll just have to collect some samples while I'm here. Jim figured it would give me time to visit and take care of some things." His gaze drifts to Rosalie, whose eyes are half-closed as she leans into his touch.

 _Oh, honey._ "Well, I'm just thrilled to have you home for a while. You tell that Kirk I owe him a supper."

"I will. He'll take you up on it, too. Kid eats like a horse."

"I fed you and George for eighteen years. I think I can handle one more."

Len chuckles. "I can invite him to the cookout if you want."

"That'd be just fine. I'm sure me and Rosalie can handle the kitchen."

"You've been cooking, sweetheart?" He raises his eyebrow in surprise.

"Don't act so surprised. Your mama'll think I don't feed you. I cooked all the time on the ship, you'll recall," Rosalie retorts, piqued.

"Don't get all huffy on me," he soothes, and gives her nape a gentle squeeze. "I just thought the counters might be too high."

"Well, they are," Eleanora admits. "But we make do. And she does herself proud."

"I bet she does," Len says quietly, and the pride in his voice makes her chest ache. She thinks of Risa, and of a glittering ring on Rosalie's finger. "I don't suppose you'd make me some of those peach hand pies I like so much?" he wheedles hopefully.

Rosalie laughs and turns her head to kiss his cheek. "If you can find me some decent peaches, I'll do it," she says. "I'd give you anything, darlin'."

 _Please mean that,_ Eleanora thinks as her son's eyes light up and his face softens, but all she says is, "No peach tonight, but I do have pecan."

"I couldn't eat another bite," Len claims, but he accepts a piece when it's offered and the dollop of ice cream besides, and when he laughs around a mouthful of pecan and slow-churned vanilla and reaches for Rosalie's hand, it's music to her ears.


	3. The Courtship Rituals of Old Country Doctors and the Proper Care of Roses

An hour later, she finds herself on the front porch swing with a belly full of pecan pie and a mug of hot cocoa in her hands. It's topped with whipped cream and dusted with cinnamon, and its warmth seeps through the ceramic and into her palms. She takes a delicate sip and shifts to settle more snugly against Leonard, who sits beside her with his own mug, one arm stretched over the back of the swing.

"You warm enough, darlin'?" he asks, and fusses with the flannel blanket in which he'd wrapped her the moment she'd flopped onto the swing.

"I'm fine, sugar." She takes another sip and rests her head on his shoulder.

His arm immediately enfolds her, and he tugs the blanket over her neck. "You keep warm," he orders, and tucks her against his side.

"Yes, Doctor," she murmurs, and turns her head to bury her nose in the fabric of his shirt. Flannel, just like the blanket, and it carries the scent of aftershave and dry autumn leaves, of Leonard. She closes her eyes and breathes deeply of him. "I love you, Leo," she whispers.

Gentle fingertips caress her face and skim over the side of her neck. "I love you, too. I missed you so much." Soft lips press a lingering kiss to her crown.

_Then why did you leave me?_ she wonders, but the question never passes her lips. Instead, she seals them with a nigh-scalding sip of cocoa and returns her head to his shoulder. It's comfortable, safe, and she has neither the strength nor the desire to examine old wounds. Not tonight, with the stars winking overhead and the solidity of him beneath her. He's here, and he remembers his love for her, and for now, it is enough.

_If this is a fantasy or a bout of wishful thinking, then I'll take it,_ she decides. _Too much hard, cold reality will drive you crazy._ She chases the thought with another sip of cocoa.

_You never thought you'd be here again, not in Georgia, where the kudzu grows lush, and not in Leonard McCoy's arms. You thought he was gone as gone could be when you woke up to find nineteen days missing from the life you had so recently resumed and no sign of the man who'd sworn he would always be there when you opened your eyes._

_Poor sister,_ her brother sneers. _What a sad little Sleeping Beauty you were when you opened your eyes and found, not the handsome Prince Charming your heart anticipated, but a woman with dark hair and olive skin and concerned, curious eyes. It was wrong, all wrong, and your bewildered heart resisted the truth your sleep-fogged eyes told._

You shouldn't be here, _you wanted to shout at the woman as she loomed over you with a bioscanner in one hand and a penlight in the other, and you closed your eyes against the piercing intrusion of the light._

Where's my lovely Bones? _you slurred, frightened by her unfamiliar face, and her lips bowed in a pensive scowl._

She's showing signs of possible brain damage, _the woman noted to a nearby nurse._ We might need to conduct a brain scan.

I don't need a brain scan. I just need my lovely Bones, _you thought wildly, and your eyes darted around the room. Surely he'd be here, in his silver scrubs with the sleeves pushed to the elbows and his hands reaching for you, or in his starched whites with a bioscanner hovering over your head like an idling insect. He'd promised you that he would always be there when you woke up, and he was. He was the last thing you saw before the drugs took hold, the last thing you felt. Kind eyes and a warm hand on your forehead just before you slipped under and into the unmatched skill of his hands. He was the first thing you saw when you returned to the world, logy and helpless and blinking the anesthesia fugue from glassy eyes._

Dr. McCoy, _you'd slur, and drugged limbs would scissor ineffectually on the biobed as your brain tried to reestablish itself._

_A warm hand on your arm and an even warmer voice in your ear._ Hush, sweetheart. Don't you move now. I'm right here. _Brown eyes would drift into your hazy field of vision, solicitous over the top of the surgical mask that still covered his mouth and nose._ I got you now _Then he'd pull down the mask and offer you a reassuring smile. Not your lover then, not yet, but gentle as one as he fussed over your blankets and straightened your I.V. lines._

You came through with flying colors, _he'd say proudly, and smooth the coverlet over your feet._ You'll be up and about in no time. _He'd smile and pat your fanning toes, and then he'd settle behind his desk and watch you over the top of his padd until you fell asleep, and in the morning, he'd rouse you for the best breakfast your uncertain stomach could handle. No matter how rough the road, he was with you every step of the way, encouraging when you struggled and chiding and goading when you got lazy._

_Your precious Bones was a man of his word. Not like me, who'd sweet-talked you into that cryotube and never looked back, or like Mama, who sold you out for a few sleepless nights and a belated return to the lifestyle to which she was accustomed as a second-generation socialite. Not like Daddy, who wouldn't look his baby girl in the eye during that last supper, and who masked the bitter tang of his restless conscience with his finest scotch._

_Except maybe your cherished Prince Charming wasn't that different, after all, because as your gaze swept the room, he was nowhere to be found. Not in silver scrubs, and not in starched whites. There was no low, soothing voice in your ear and no steady hand to grasp your outstretched fingers. He'd left you high and dry just like we did, and he didn't have the courtesy to tell you goodbye and thank you for the fuck._

_You willed it not to be, willed him to appear with every fiber of your being._

Leonard, honey, where are you? _you thought as the doctor loomed over you and the nurses crowded around like a living shroud._ Where are you? You promised you'd always be there when I woke up. _You shied from the hands that reached for you and peered between the pressing bodies in search of a flash of science blues or sleek, brown hair._ Please don't leave me, Leo.

_But he did leave you, and he never came, not even when they advanced on you with their hypos and syringes. Cinderella had lost her slipper, and there was no eager prince to bring it back. He was gone, and you were alone, and the realization was as suffocating as the closing of the cryotube lid over your face._

_And oh, how you cried, didn't you, sister? You cried until your lungs burned for want of air because you were afraid that if you didn't, the incalculable, crushing enormity of your disbelieving grief would collapse them inside your chest. You fought the burning, invasive prick of the needles and sobbed through the centuries for a memaw who was so much radioactive dust strewn throughout the cosmos and so much wistful memory. You sobbed until your throat was raw, and when you couldn't cry anymore, you curled into a ball in a bed become your cage and coughed like a throttled dog. The surroundings were unfamiliar, sterile and blank and bloodless as a morgue despite the monotonous chirp of cardiac monitors, but the loneliness and shame were as familiar as the skin stretched over your warped and aching bones._

_Hope dies hard, and for weeks, you waited for him to sweep onto the ward in a scathing, towering fury and scoop you from the bed or march you out of the ward with authority in his stride and fire in his eyes. You strained your ears for the sound of his footfalls in the corridor or the seething, irascible mutter of his voice as he neatly excoriated the doctors and nurses responsible for your care and peppered them with questions about your treatment. Your nostrils flared to catch the scent of him on the sanitized air, and you looked up at every flash of starched whites and brown hair, a jubilant smile tucked in the corner of your mouth like a celebratory streamer. But you never heard him, and the air never smelled of anything but disinfectant and stale piss, and the smile you held at the ready disintegrated like old crepe._

_You'd've lain down and died if they'd let you; you were so lost and tired of being alone, discarded like a novelty that had outlived its charm, but doctors, damn them, are obsessed with preserving life even when there's no will to live it, so they prodded you out of bed and forced you through your listless paces and three meals down your gullet, and after a while, you stopped resisting. It was easier to do as you were told and let them think they were making progress, and fools that they were, they believed it. They jotted down your every accomplishment, no matter how meager. Right beside your bowel movements and urine output, like as not, and you just accepted their meaningless praise and finished your grieving behind dead eyes and tightly-sealed lips._

_They could make you eat and shit and go to PT, but they couldn't make you talk. You never said a word after that initial plea for your absent love. Dr. Rahood(she of the olive skin and assessing eyes)and the nurses coaxed and wheedled, cajoled and commanded. They even threatened a time or two, but you didn't care. Sedation would be a blessing, a respite from the yawning hole your departed doctor had left in his wake, and as far as you could tell you'd only be missing tedious hours on the therapy mat and the dreary view of the interior courtyard afforded by the rear windows. Speech was dangerous. Speech revealed and exposed and betrayed, and you wouldn't make that mistake again, not for wardens in scrubs who'd just tuck scraps of you into their files like tissue samples and send you on down the line when you had nothing left with which to pique their ephemeral interest._

_Eventually, they stopped trying to pry words from your throat like teeth from an infected jaw. Now and then, Dr. Rahood or the morning duty nurse lobbed a half-hearted conversational gambit your way, but neither was surprised when it went unanswered, and so long as you ate your food and pooped on schedule and turned up to PT on time to be stretched and pushed and evaluated by clinical hands that smelled of talc and latex and hand sanitizer, they were content to leave you to your silence and your secrets._

_Oh, Lordy, Lordy, what a time they would've had if they could've pried open your mouth to peer at your dreams. Sometimes, you dreamed of that terrible afternoon when you sought my advice and I told you the truth with sweet tea on my forked tongue. Sometimes, you dreamed of Grandmama Lavinia and that trip to New Orleans, or of that final hug on her front porch, when you held on so tightly that your shoulders ached. Sometimes, you dreamed of the cramped and airless confines of a cryotube, and of a distorted, brown blur that pressed a cold hypo to your neck. A flash of science blues just before that frigid darkness blotted out the world for the second time._

_Mostly, though, you dreamed of your gentlemanly doctor, your precious Leo. His voice, his scent, his laughter. Because contrary to the rumors and supposition floating around the ship, he did laugh, your Leo, a low, rumbling chuckle that welled from the center of his chest, warm and inviting as winter whiskey. You dreamed of the way he sometimes hummed under his breath when his research was going well, and the way he muttered darkly under it when it wasn't. You dreamed of the amiable thump of his bare feet on the floor of his quarters as he shuffled off to his morning shower, bare-chested and tousle-haired and idly scratching his ass. You dreamed of his dry, good-morning kiss as he laced up his boots, and the skim of his hand across your bare shoulders as he left for his shift. You dreamed of your name on his lips, the slow, honeyed drawl of it, as though you were a treasure and not the leavings trimmed from some greater creature and fashioned into a patchwork girl by an angel with more hubris than skill._

See you later, my pretty little sugar, _breathed into your ear like a secret promise before he left for sickbay. And he always did, didn't he, my not-so-innocent Rosalie?_

_You dreamed of Risa, of the purple sand beneath his knees as he knelt for photos on the beach, and of the soft, black earth between your fingers as he fucked you at the edge of the lagoon. His hands curled tightly enough to bruise around the hips he had so meticulously realigned and his teeth nipping at the tender flesh of your shoulder as he drove into you. Sometimes the genteel good doctor bit you when he came, growled deep in his throat as his hips snapped and bucked and sent his spend into your clutching little cunt. And oh, but didn't my sexless sister like that? You loved it, as a matter of fact, loved the sting of his teeth and the promissory throb of the flesh beneath his fingers and the hot, possessive stretch of him between your legs. You reveled in it and begged him not to stop, begged him for more. Wonder what Grandmama Lavinia would think to see her favorite granddaughter moaning and writhing in the dirt like a two-dollar whore on the first cock to give you a second glance._

_These dreams were so vivid that sometimes you awoke with the memory of them still tingling on your skin and lingering on the air. For an instant before the reality of the hospital reasserted itself, you smelled salt and sand and sex, copper and damp earth and the musk of his cologne. Then the illusion faded, and you were left blinking in your biobed with nothing but the lurking stench of piss in your nostrils and a torturous ache between your slick thighs. You curled in on yourself and turned your back on the duty nurse slumped at his desk and stared down the row of indistinct forms tucked beneath hospital-issue cotton and wished like hell for five minutes of privacy so you could slip your hand beneath the covers and ease the ache you could reach, but the duty nurse was seldom so obliging, and the monitors above the biobed would betray your furtive efforts at the slightest acceleration of heartrate and respiration. So you could only lie there with the sheets clenched in your fists and your teeth gritted against a yowl of frustration and wait for the shameful need to pass._

_You hated the bastard for it because he didn't deserve it. He'd forfeited the right to inspire it the minute he jettisoned you from his ship and his life like unsatisfactory merchandise returned to sender and showed himself to be no better than the frat boys who'd used you as a living blow-up doll and left you with nothing to show for it but the stink of beer and sweat on your skin. Worse, truth be told, since none of them had ever professed their love with every roll of their hips. He was a liar and a low-down son of a bitch, and your body should've expunged his memory from the cellular record. Head up and shoulders back and to hell with him._

_But try as you might to forget, you never could. There remained a hard kernel of love that your wounded fury couldn't crush. A wisp of laughter in your ear. The memory of his hand between your bony shoulder blades. The solidity of his chest beneath your ear. Two months on, and you couldn't stop yourself from checking your padd twice a day for a message from afar, for a glimpse of brown hair and high cheekbones and the shy, aw-shucks smile meant only for those he loved best, for you and for Jim and for Nyota and her gentle teasing. Two months on, and you couldn't stop yourself from looking up every time you heard brisk, booted footfalls coming down the ward. It was never him, and you knew it never would be, but the disappointment always came, sharp and cutting and sinking to the bone and gristle of you, and often, it hurt so bad that you couldn't breathe. You stared at the poor bastard who had the audacity to not be who you were looking for and willed air from your frozen lungs and hid behind your jittering padd until they passed. Sometimes, you cried, and you hated yourself for the pathetic weakness of it, sniveling in your wheelchair like some lovesick teenager over a man who probably hadn't spared you a thought since he last rinsed the slickness of your cunt from his sated cock. What would Grandmama think if she could see her proud little rose pining and withering for want of a man?_

_Even the invocation of Grandmama's disapproval couldn't banish the hurt that weltered and festered in your bones. It was shameful and embarrassing and not who you ever thought you'd be when you were coming up at her knee and learning how a lady should act, but you wanted, pure and simple. You wanted his touch and his taste and the softness of his hair beneath your caressing fingers. You wanted his slow, sweet drawl and the smell of his skin and the heat of his desire. You wanted_ him. _In his arms was the closest to home you'd ever be, and you'd've sold your cherished pride just to hold him one more time._

_Still, you fought it. You wouldn't be a Walker if you didn't, and just because you'd give up your pride, that doesn't mean you'd give it up easy. Always so bull-necked, so damn determined to keep on no matter how much it cost, but even you have your limits, and one day, you just couldn't do it anymore. You couldn't stand the thought of waking up to that miserable, yawning emptiness for the next fifty years and breathing through the anguish lodged in your lungs like croup and burning in your gut like an ulcer. You refused to go on living this terrible half-life of dispassionate hands and bittersweet memories and a simmering need embedded in the bones and sinew that no hypo or salve would ever touch. You refused to go on dying without the feeble mercy of that final, numbing darkness._

_So you pulled in as far as you could, retreated from the world until it was reduced to nothing but nettling white noise, irksome but inconsequential. You'd spent two hundred and forty years stuffed inside the airless, frigid blackness of a cryotube, and with a little effort, you could return to where you were meant to be, deaf and blind and forever mute inside a cocoon of skin and bone. The doctors and nurses might wonder at your transformation for a while, might poke and prod and try to drag you back into their joyless world with stern commands and the application of painful stimuli, but if you held your tongue and dimmed your eyes and steadfastly ignored the insolent prick of the needle and the indolent drip of blood oozing down your arms, they would lose interest. They always did, those proud, white-coated shamans of bedpan and stethoscope. They extolled their successes and shunned their failures, and when you didn't respond to their pointed exhortations and imperious commands to rise, Lazarus, arise, for a third time, they would sigh and strip off their gloves and note your obstinacy on their charts and leave you to wander the lonely corridors of your mind._

_It was a comforting thought, and you set your mind to do exactly that, but love is as tenacious and jealous as the grave, and it wouldn't let you go. You could withdraw for a time, submerge yourself in absolute darkness, deaf, dumb, and blind while you stared blankly out the windows or let the therapists tug and fold and massage you like a slab of breathing beef, but Bones was the ghost you couldn't exorcise, as dogged in spirit as he was in the flesh. He'd slip into the comforting darkness in which you'd swaddled yourself and coil around you like wreathing smoke._

C'mon now, my pretty little sugar, _he'd whisper, and unseen lips would ghost over the sensitive flesh of your nape._ Don't you quit. Don't you quit on me. _And then he'd suck the supple skin between his teeth and hold it there until you shuddered and rose onto your toes in your chair until you formed a buckling parabola._

_A final, impudent nip, and you'd hurtle into sudden, jarring awareness, thrust rudely into a world that was suddenly too bright and too loud._ Why? Why should I have to? _you wanted to scream at him even as your hands reached from him with splayed, trembling fingers._ You quit. You gave me up.

_But your unwanted knight in shining armor would be gone as quickly as he'd come, and you'd be left blinking in the light with your hands fisted on your lap and your breath coming in rapid, shallow gasps._

You fucker, _you'd think as tears stung your eyes and your nails dug crescents into the palms of your hands._ You dirty-riding fucker. You've got no right. _And then you'd cry, rocking to and fro in your chair as nurses hurried over to see what had stirred you from your customary torpor. You never told them a damn thing. You couldn't and you wouldn't. Bones might've been a pain beyond endurance, but he was yours, and you'd be damned if you offered him up to their inspection, any more than you'd offered yourself up to the gawking appraisal of shit-faced college kids as you slunk from a frat house with your underwear wadded under your skirt. So you kept your mouth shut and dried your eyes and let them write whatever the hell they wanted in their cherished record of your joyless, stagnant life._

_It got so bad that you considered turning yourself over to Moira Boswell and letting her take you apart. You weren't much good for anything else, rotting on the long-term ward like a forgotten hothouse flower, and at least with Boswell, there would be no room for dreams, no illusion of hope. There would be only isolation and pain, but maybe it would do what your flagging willpower couldn't and wipe all thoughts of Leo from your head. It would be hard to pine for your walkaway Joe if you were getting your brain scrambled by synaptic recalibration procedures or having your surgically-repaired hips dislocated to study his technique. Pain scours as efficiently as it etches, and maybe it would make you forget everything that you missed so damn much._

_You must've composed that email in your head a thousand times, and you nearly sent it half a dozen, finger hovering over the send button. You never sent it, though. You couldn't. Every time your finger descended to the button, you'd think of Leo and how hard he fought to keep you away from her, to keep you safe. You'd feel his arms around you as he swept you off her exam table and ordered you back to the ship and see him in sickbay, crouched over your bruised, swollen feet with an analgesic hypo in his hand and righteous indignation in his eyes. You'd see him hunkered at his desk in sickbay and rattling off furious letters to Starfleet Medical, demanding to know why the hearing into his complaint against the illustrious Dr. Boswell was lost in bureaucratic limbo._

Think they're just going to sweep this under the damn rug, _he'd mutter, and scowl thunderously at his com screen._ Well, they won't. _And then he'd adjust himself in his seat and fire off another blistering missive._

_It was probably a mercy for both of you that the complaint bogged down in indifference and red tape. You had no desire to see Dr. Boswell again, and any Starfleet JAG officer worth his salt would waste no time in exposing all the good doctor's dirty little secrets. How much weight would all his righteous fury carry once it came out that he was hip-deep between your scrawny thighs most every night? It would ruin him, and never mind that he'd raised Starfleet's golden boy from the dead. He'd lose his license and his commission and everything he worked so hard for, and all because he just had to have a taste of your honeycomb._

_So you never sent that letter and roused that sleeping dog. You just bided your time and prayed for numbness to set in, and then one day, that idiot nurse sashayed up with Mother Bones in tow. Of course, you had no inkling of her identity then, nor were your suspicions aroused when that condescending twit introduced her as Ms. Latham. To you, she was just another psychiatrist or well-intended social worker bent on drawing you out of your shell with evals disguised as inane conversation about the ancient days of yore, when man was still bound to the earth and gas was $3.47 a gallon, or with old board games you'd never played the first time around. Compact and sturdy, with silver hair and shrewd brown eyes and a blouse that smelled of starch and hot iron._

_Then she opened her mouth and spoke of a forty-acre dairy farm, and recognition prickled on your skin like the skittering caress of sand. She was possessed of the same bald frankness and the same willingness to wield the rough side of her tongue. It was in the way she carried herself, too, in the sardonic quirk of her lips and her preference for standing with her hands behind her back and one hand circling the opposite wrist. You'd seen that posture a thousand times before, back when your Leo was still just Dr. McCoy and following you up and down the aisle in sickbay and grunting at you to put your shoulders back._

_You weren't exactly surprised when she revealed her identity in the cab of that old pickup truck, surrounded by the faint smells of hay and cowhide, but hearing Leo's name on her lips squeezed your battered heart inside your chest, and you had to turn your head to hide the tears. In the heart of Leo's world was the last place you wanted to be when your heart was still firmly overruling your head and your smarting pride, which insisted that it didn't want a damn thing more from that silver-tongued son of a bitch, but it was better than spending the rest of your days staring out the sunroom window of some convalescent home perfumed in diseased piss and unwashed bodies and fighting some cantankerous old goat for the last dollop of cold mashed potatoes and lumpy gravy._

_So you stiffened your lip and buried another set of wishes and let her take you to your next secondhand home. Rolling through that front door nearly brought you to you knees because you could see Leo everywhere. You could feel him in the sturdy walls and heavy, crotcheted rug in the middle of the living room, see him settled here on the porch swing or in one of the matching rocking chairs that overlooked the winding drive. You could imagine him tussling with his older brother in front of the fireplace, grinning and gap-toothed and still growing into his bones or sitting to the supper table in a flannel shirt and jeans, sixteen and just beginning to show the broad shoulders he'd carry as a man. You could hear him on the air, whistling as he crossed the yard to the milking barn or laughing at one of George's smartass remarks. You could smell him in the fabric of the afghans draped over the back of the couch. It was Leo, alive and so incredibly real, and sometimes you closed your eyes and pressed your face into the fabric and pretended you were in his arms again, safe and sound and undeniably loved._

_But you never were, and every day, you hated the world a little more._

_Looking at his pictures stirred memories you'd tried so hard to bury beneath the scrim of kiss-my-ass that surrounded your heart, and hearing Mother Bones chattering gaily about her Len reawakened the heartbreak you'd so clumsily mended with indignation and feigned indifference. Each tidbit of news and idle ship's gossip reminded you of the goodness and kindness that had been torn from your grasp by a goddamn case of the flu and sank serrated claws deep into your undefended places. It might've been easier if you could cry, but pride was all you had left, and you wouldn't surrender it as easily as you'd surrendered your cunt to her bouncing baby boy, so you swallowed the rage and blinked back the salty sting of tears and let her oblivious mother's pride wash over you in a scalding tide._

_The weekly com calls were the worst. You'd hear that familiar voice spilling out of those speakers, and your painstakingly-crafted equilibrium threatened to shatter, a wineglass subjected to high-frequency vibration. You'd clutch the armrests of your chair until your joints creaked and your knuckles went white, and God if you didn't want to throw up, just double over your shaking knees and heave until you were hollow. He was right there, a room away, and you wanted to burst in and demand answers, wring them from the lips whose imprint you could still feel in the hollow of your throat, soft as velvet and enticing as sin._

Come on, my pretty little sugar _breathed against your skin as you arched to expose your throat and splayed to accept his cock. But you refused to make a fool of yourself in front of his mama, whom you respected, and let's be honest, big sister, you were afraid of the answers, of the unflattering truths that might spill from those glorious lips. You didn't want to know that you were nothing but an x-rated experiment in the name of science or a roll in the hay to keep the devil's itch at bay until something better came along. You'd tasted the gall of unwanted truth times without number. Your time with Leo was an illusion you wanted to preserve, and so you quashed the impulse to hover in the doorway like a moonstruck calf while Mother Bones was on the com and told yourself that whatever he said was of no never mind to you, an awkward relic of his past._

_And then came that come-to-Jesus meeting in the kitchen, when Eleanora McCoy delivered the gospel from on High and slapped the scales from your eyes. She was fire and brimstone and towering, righteous fury, a lioness protecting her cornered cub, and she looked and sounded so much like Grandmama Lavinia that you froze. Pride demanded that you defend yourself, match her pique with your own, but you couldn't. You wouldn't insult her at her own table with a mouthful of hubris and feeble, sputtering justifications. She had the might of right on her side, and you could only take the hiding you had coming._

_There wasn't a damn thing you could say when she was finished, so you kept your mouth shut and ate your supper in small, slow bites to get it down your constricted throat, and when you'd downed enough to satisfy decency, you turned tail and retreated to the barn. The possibility that Leo might still love you had never entered your mind; that godless cryotube was everything love was not--cold and claustrophobic and pitiless. It was where they put you when time and patience ran thin and the endless, sucking need of your disability exceeded their guilty charity. How could he love you when he'd packed you away like a failed experiment and sent you away? When your com stayed silent and your inbox never flashed his name? It couldn't be. As that pointy-eared goblin would've said, it was illogical, a theory born of hope rather than evidence._

_And yet, you longed to believe it and clung to the slender thread of it with wet eyes and trembling fingers. You thought of his mother and her sudden appearance at the hospital, and of the certainty in her blazing eyes when she'd declared his love for you. You thought of those blessed blue vials that turned up with his signature on the prescription, and the brief note that accompanied them, sparse and curt and filled with detailed instructions on how to load and inject the hypo he'd included; he'd even drawn a diagram in his neat, meticulous hand. The words held nothing but a physician's regard for a former patient, but the paper... That he used paper at all was unusual. An email would've sufficed, would've been better for his records, but he'd written the letter in ink on good paper, and when you unfolded it, you caught a whiff of the cologne and aftershave he wore when he was courting, crisp and clean, evergreen and fresh-fallen snow. The words were there for anyone who cared to read them, but the letter was meant for you alone._

_And what about the memories that flit at the periphery of your mind, the vague, incomprehensible images you can't bring into focus and the snatches of dialogue you can't place? The distant recollection of fire on your skin and cotton in your lungs, of choking on river mud?_

Don't you quit on me. Don't you quit. _A ghost whispering in your ear. The cool, slippery smoothness of neoprene against your back. A heartbeat in your ear. Cupped hands scooping cold water into your dry, parched mouth. Fingers carding through your wet hair._

I'm sorry, darlin'. I'm so sorry. -Ove you so much. -ake up -not there. be- I- wan- be. _A garbled message you couldn't decipher._

_A flicker of blue and an instant of all-consuming terror. You're still trying to make sense of this incomplete patchwork of sensory recollection, but you do know that with the exception of the last image, which inspires a terror that lodges in your throat like bone and loosens your bladder alarmingly, they're threaded with an inexplicable sense of comfort and safety, and sometimes when you're turning them over in your head, you catch a trace of evergreen and fresh-fallen snow._

_Still, you're a bitter pragmatist at heart, so you didn't dare trust to Mother Bones' avowals of love and loyalty. It was too good to be true, too much the stuff of bad soap operas and childhood fantasy. Then Leo came through that door with his heart in his eyes and roses in his hands and did what no one has ever done. He apologized. He hit his knees, as a matter of fact. No excuses or useless justifications. Just the two words Mama and Daddy never said and those fine surgeon's hands reaching for you as if you were the most precious thing in his world._

_That's because you are, Rosalie, honey,_ Grandma Lavinia says. _He hasn't stopped fussing over you since he first clapped eyes on you, and trust me, sugar, a man doesn't look at a woman the way your doctor looks at you unless she holds his heart in the palm of his hand._

"Penny for your thoughts, darlin'?" Leo says suddenly, and she starts, startled from her reverie.

"Mmm. They're not worth that much." She reluctantly raises her head from his shoulder and takes a sip of lukewarm cocoa. "Think I let this sit too long while I was wool-gathering."

"You want me to warm it up for you?"

"No. You'd have to go into the kitchen, and it might wake your mama."

"Mama sleeps like the dead," he replies with amiable bluntness. "Side effect of hard work."

"Besides, then you'd have to get up, and I'm not ready to give you up just yet." She lowers her mug and settles into him once more. "Though I might have to if you're going to help your mama with her morning rounds."

He hums and takes a sip of cocoa. "Wouldn't be the first time I've gone without sleep. I am a doctor."

"Well, you shouldn't have to, especially not on my account."

He surveys her over the rim of his mug, eyes half-lidded and fond. "Hush," he says softly. "I'm courtin'."

"Is that so?"

He raises an eyebrow. "Apparently, I haven't made my intentions clear." He eases his shoulder from beneath her head and bends to set his mug on the porch beside his feet. Then he straightens and plucks hers from her hands. "Now," he says when her mug has been duly banished to the porch. He resettles her against him, tucks the flannel blanket more snugly around her shoulders, and slides a finger beneath her chin. "Now," he repeats softly, and tilts her chin upward. "Allow me to make my intentions clear." He strokes her chin with the ball of his thumb for a moment, and then he kisses her.

It's soft and slow and sweet as the first time, sweeter for the protracted absence. She shudders and tastes cocoa and cinnamon and whipped cream, and her hand curls around his nape to pull him closer. He hums in approval, and his tongue darts out to tease her lips. Warmth blossoms in the center of her chest, and she opens to him.

"My pretty little sugar," he murmurs, and cups her cheek and lets his hand glide down the delicate stem of her neck. "I've missed you so much," he breathes against her mouth. It's a ragged rasp, and she draws back in surprise.

"What's the matter? You sound awfully upset for someone who's courting." She runs her fingers through his hair.

He presses his forehead to hers. "Trust me, sweetheart, it isn't the courtin'." He tucks stray strands of golden hair behind her ear. "I'm just not fool enough to think I haven't done you wrong."

"No, but you are a sweet fool," she says fondly, and helps herself to a kiss. "What you did'll keep a while. "What you're doing right now is giving me an experience I've never had before."

That earns her a bashful grin. "What's that?" He traces a whorl over the shell of her ear.

She shivers with delight. "You're taken me necking beneath the stars."

His grin turns devilish. "And it's been my pleasure." He darts forward to claim another kiss, jubilant and hungry and possessive, and his hands tangle in her hair.

"Not just yours," she pants when he finally breaks the kiss. "I've missed you like hell, Leo."

He slides his arms around her and lifts her onto his lap in a swift, decisive movement. "Well, I've got you now," he says, and wraps his arms around her midsection. "You just sit right here and look at the stars and let me keep you warm." 

She tangles her fingers with his and lets her head loll against the back of the swing. Leo's chest rises and falls against her back, steady as a metronome, and she lets it lull her as she gazes at the sky just beyond the porch. The stars are bright in the firmament, cold, silver fire that washes over the tops of the pines that border the opposite side of the creek that curves around the side of the house and winds past the back to spill into a manmade pond used to water the cattle. She can hear it burbling over the rocks, melodious and chuntering, and she smiles.

_It'll be cold that water,_ she thinks idly. _Cold and sharp as glass. A sip of that, and you'd think your mouth was bleeding. Come December, there might even be slush in it._

A sudden moist warmth on the point of her jaw, and Leo's hands caress her arms from shoulder to wrist. "Don't suppose I could ask a penny for your thoughts now?"

She chuckles. "It's beautiful."

"Mmm." The warmth descends to the side of her neck." "Not as beautiful as you."

She groans. "You should leave the pick-up lines to Jim," she says, but she doesn't retreat from that enticing heat.

"I don't do pick-up lines," he retorts, and the wounded indignation makes her grin. "I'm just telling the God's honest truth," he says loftily. He emphasizes his point with a flick of his tongue against her carotid.

"You keep doing that, and we might be leaving courtship in the dust," she warns, and nascent desire blossoms low in her belly.

"Like that, do you?"

"Don't be coy, Doctor," she chides.

"Why not? It's in m name, after all." He mouths her neck.

"Smartass." She hisses and arches when he sucks her flesh between his teeth and nips.

"I can stop if you want," he says innocently, and teases the stinging flesh with his tongue.

"No," she says quickly, and blushes at the wanton eagerness of it.

He chuckles. "If it's any consolation, I don't want to stop, either." 

"Good. I'd hate to think I'd lost my touch."

"Darlin, you never could," he says faintly, and his voice is rough. He pumps his feet, and the swing begins to rock with a faint squeak of the chains.

"Needs some oil," he muses.  
"Uh huh," she manages. She doesn't give a good goddamn about the swing's maintenance requirements. There is only Leo, his touch and his scent and the solidity of him at her back.

"I always dreamed of this," he says, and brushes her hair from her face to plant lazy, open-mouthed kisses from the point of her jaw to the side of her mouth. She can smell pecan pie and vanilla ice cream on his breath.

"Of getting me all hot and bothered on your mama's porch?" She squirms. She's so wet, and even the fabric of her panties is becoming an exquisite torment.

"Of courtin' you at home," he clarifies. "I figured I was going to have to wait another year and a half before I could court you properly."

"You have been courting me properly," she retorts. "I've never felt so much a lady." _Even with my legs spreading like some helpless, horny teenager._

"The promenade of a starship is no place for courtin'."

"You did plenty well enough. Besides, we did most of our serious courting in the galleys and the arboretum. And what about Risa?" she reminds him.

"Risa was the best I could do."

"And it was wonderful."

"It's not what I wanted to give you," he insists mulishly. "I wanted to bring you home, court you under a moon you recognized. Let you smell the jasmine and magnolia. Maybe love you on a blanket down by the creek." 

"Well, you're giving it to me now. Minus the jasmine and magnolia."

"Too late in the year for that. I would've if I could've, sweetheart." Wistful and laced with bitter self-reproach. 

"Trust me, I'm not missing either one of them a bit."

"I'll give them to you someday," he promises.

"I've got everything I want right here," she says, and entangles her fingers with his. "What more could I ask for? I'm under the stars in the arms of a man who loves me."

"I do love you, Rosalie. So much." It's a croak, and she twists on his lap to catch a glimpse of wet eyes. He coughs and averts his gaze.

_Oh, sweetheart._

_There's a man who's tearing himself up,_ Grandmama Lavinia notes. _Probably has been for a while._

_Then why did he leave me?_

_I don't know, sugar. Why don't you ask him?_

She balks. She's known Leo for more than a year and shared her heart and his bed for almost ten months, and she's never seen him so raw. His heart is as big as the world and just as tender, but he guards it jealously, hides it behind snorts and glowers and ill-tempered muttering about reckless fools who don't take care of themselves. It's rare to see it so ruthlessly exposed, and she has no desire to prod the wound.

_And let's be honest, sister dear,_ her brother sneers. _It's perversely flattering to realize you inspire such powerful reactions in a man, such powerful need. You've spent your whole life being a living doll used to fulfill other people's needs, whether it be Mama's need for a permanent, long-suffering angel and sympathy token or those wasted frat boys who needed a warm blow-up doll to spend themselves in, and now you've got a man--a fine, learned, successful one, at that--coming to you with his wounded heart in his hands. What a power trip that must be for you._

She pushes the cruel and unflattering assessment aside. "There's no reason to get upset," she says, and strokes the hair at his temple. "You're here with me now, and that's what matters." She squeezes his hand and resettles herself against his chest.

He clears his throat, and his chest expands and rises as he takes a deep breath.

"Though now that I think on it," she says slowly, "I wouldn't mind a little bit of that love on a blanket you were talking about."

"Would you now?" comes the reply, and there's a smile in it. "Well, I'll see to it." He nuzzles her crown. "I don't think I'm up to the task tonight. It was a long flight, and I'll be damned if I'll have you catch your death for a roll in the hay."

"It's not likely to get much warmer," she points out.

"No, he agrees. "But I can take some measures to make it more comfortable."

"Spoken from experience," she teases. "And here I thought I was special."

The swing stops. "You are special," he murmurs. "You're the first one I've ever courted at home."

That surprises her. "But...what about Pamela?"

"We did our courting at school. I brought her here to get married. I danced with her in the backyard, down by Mama's rosebushes. But I never loved her by the creek. There wasn't time. Daddy took sick shortly after the wedding, and I didn't have much mind for anything else."

She says nothing. Leo speaks often and lovingly of his late father, of learning chores at his knowledgeable hand and lazy summer evenings spent on the porch with sweat and sweet hay embedded in the fabric of their work shirts, but he has rarely spoken of his father's death or the illness that claimed him. In fact, he'd said nothing of his father's death at all except that it had happened before he joined Starfleet. What little she knows comes from Eleanora, and even that is oblique and shadowed.

_Len took such good care of David when he was sick. Worked himself to nothing. He took it so hard when his daddy died. Thought I was going to lose him, too, for a while,_ she'd told her once not long after the thundering come-to-Jesus meeting in the kitchen. _What I mean to say is that Len is a good man, honey, and he fights hard for what he loves. All I'm asking is a little patience with that boy of mine._

"That must've been hard," she ventures.

He stiffens. "It was," he says brusquely. He clears his throat again, and he's squeezing her hand so tightly that it hurts. Then he relaxes his grip, and the swing resumes its tranquil arc. "But that was then."

"So leave it lie and occupy your mind with how you're going to fulfill another fantasy of mine."

"Yes, ma'am," and his laughter vibrates between her shoulder blades. 

For a while, the only sounds are Leo's steady breathing and the companionable creak of the swing. Then he shifts beneath her and says, "I suppose it's time to turn in. I'd like to help Mama check the property tomorrow, and she likes to make an early start of it, as I recall."

"All right, sugar. I don't suppose I could get one more kiss before you go?"

He eases her off his lap and stretches his legs to restore circulation. "I'll give you as many kisses as you want."

"Careful. I might hold you to it," she says, and closes her eyes as his fingers caress her cheek.

The kiss is slow and sweet and warms her to her toes, which curl inside her shoes, and when it's finished, he gives her another for good measure.

"You turning in, too?" he asks.

"Mmhm."

"I'll walk you in."

"Oh, I don't sleep in the house."

His brow furrows. "Where do you sleep?"

"The milking barn."

"The milking barn," he repeats flatly, as though she's just announced she eats dirt on the regular. "Why in God's name are you sleeping in the milking barn?"

She shrugs. "I can't get up the stairs to the bedrooms. There's one off the parlor downstairs, but it's been shut up since I've been here." His eyes darken, but he remains silent. "I was sleeping on the sofa in the parlor at first, but there's no privacy for dressing in the mornings. It was awkward when George came stumping through while I was still just about bare."

An inelegant, sputtering squawk escapes him.

"So George fixed up a little area in the back. It's got a cot and a space heater and room for my chair and my footlocker."

"Show me."

"All right, darlin. Steady the swing so I can transfer?"

Leo rises from the swing and crosses behind it to steady it from the side nearest her waiting chair, and he hovers while she performs the complex gymnastics of bracing hands and wobbling, pivoting feet. He doesn't let go until she's securely settled in her chair, and then he waits for her to spin and roll toward the detachable ramp on the side of the porch.

"Seems solid enough," he grunts as she descends in a smooth glide. "Needs rails, though. You could go sailing off the side in the dark."

"He did his best on short notice. Neither of them was expecting to take in a hobbled stray."

No response, but she can see him on the periphery of her vision as he stalks along beside her. His lips are pressed into a thin, hard line, and now and then, a muscle in his jaw twitches as he chews over words he refuses to speak. He raises his hand and rubs furiously at his nape, and when it drops, he swears under his breath.

"Shit," he spits, and his footsteps pound the hapless grass underfoot. "Goddamn barn."

"She did the best she could," she reiterates placidly, and reaches out to brush her fingers over the spar of his wrist.

But Leo won't be moved. He lengthens his stride and pulls ahead to open one of the large, white, wooden doors. She rolls through the door and groans inwardly as the small front wheels dig into the hard-packed earth. It's a minor nuisance to which she has grown accustomed, but she knows her struggle, no matter how fleeting, will only inflame his incipient bout of temper.

"For God's sake," he mutters as she rocks back and forth to free her wheels. "You're not sleeping in the barn, Rosalie," he declares.

She grinds forward through the dirt, undeterred. "You haven't even seen it yet."

"I don't need to. You're not sleeping here."

She pays him no mind and continues to the small alcove she calls hers, tucked opposite the last stall. According to George, it had been meant as another stall, but had been too small for the purpose. It had been used as a tack room for a time, and before she'd moved in, it had been a rack room for drowsy farmhands in need of a nap. Now it houses a cot with a quilt and set of sheets and a footlocker against the foot of the cot. There's a privacy curtain on wheels standing at the ready on the opposite wall.  
"This is it?" Leo stares at the curtain in horrified fascination. "This looks like it was lifted from a hospital."

"No idea where that came from. Your mama just rolled it out one day. The footlocker _is_ from the hospital. I didn't have much to speak of when you shipped me out."

He tears his gaze from the curtain and rounds on her. "You're not sleeping here."

"Why not? It's not much, but it's cozy, and it has what I need."

"Cozy," he scoffs. "It's a goddamn cranny in the milking barn."

"So?"

"So?" He shakes his head. "You're not sleeping in here, dammit." He steps back and seizes the push handles of her chair, and before she can protest, he tips her onto her rear wheels, spins her around, and rolls her toward the doors.

"Leonard McCoy, what on earth is _wrong_ with you?" she demands, flabbergasted, and puts her palms on the wheels to stay their forward motion.

"What's wrong with _me_?" He drops her out of the wheelie so suddenly that her teeth rattle. "I'm not the one obsessed with sleeping in the barn." He rounds to the front of her chair and glares at her.

"What's wrong with it?" Incredulous and indignant. "I've been doing it for nigh on three months now. Surely you've done it a time or two."

"Yeah, when I was sixteen and too dumb to know better." He scowls and crosses his arms. "And I was never fool enough to do it come fall."

"It's plenty warm enough. Especially with the space heater."

He snorts. "Oh, there's safety for you, a space heater around a bunch of hay and dust. One stray straw, and this old barn's an inferno in four minutes. You'd be cooked in your bed."

"I'm not an idiot," she snaps. "Christ, give me some credit." 

_Besides, it's mighty rich of you to give a damn what happens to me now._

"It's not a matter of idiocy," he counters hotly. "It's a matter of the odds. Bad accidents happen to good people all the time. And like I said, it's getting too cold for you to be in here."

"Honey, you're overreacting."

"Overreacting? Six months ago, I watched you drowning in your own goddamn lungs, listened to that that godawful, wet rattling and prayed like hell you wouldn't quit altogether."

_Don't you quit. Don't you quit on me._

"I plunged you in and out of cooling tubs for hours at a time, days, just trying to keep your brains from cooking inside your head. Damn near blew out my back. Dammit, Rosalie, I had to watch you dying and couldn't do a damn thing about it. So don't you sit there and expect me to watch you kill yourself. You're not sleeping in that barn. You ain't."

She's never seen him like this. Angry, yes, ranting and railing and issuing doctorly edicts, but never frightened. His expression is thunderous and challenging, but his eyes are anguished, and pleading despite his furious bravado.

"All right, Leo. All right. No sleeping in the barn."

He eyes her warily for a moment, and then his shoulders descend from around his ears. He gives a single brusque nod. "Thank God for the triumph of reason," he mutters, and circles to the back of her chair again.

He pushes her back to the house and rolls her inside. "We'll set you up in the parlor," he whispers, and eases the screen door closed behind him. "We'll make you a cozy little nest of it. You go on ahead and get changed, and I'll get you some blankets."

"Actually, I have to use the bathroom. And my pajamas are in the barn."

"Oh. Well, you go on and use the bathroom, and I'll replicate some nightclothes."

"Don't put your mama out."

He huffs. "No need to play the martyr. Making things are what a replicator is for. You have any idea how many shirts me and George wrung out of that old thing?"

"Still."

"Still nothing. Stop thinking you're imposing. Now go on. Take care of yourself. I'll have some blankets and nightclothes for you when you come out."

She can sense his gaze on her as she rolls to retrieve her crutches, and footsteps sound behind her as she sets her brakes, swings out her footplates, and slips her arms into the forearm loops. He hovers at her shoulder, and gentle fingertips skim her elbow.

"You've gotten good," he remarks as she plants the crutches and rises to her feet.

"High praise, coming from you." She waits until she finds her center of gravity before she swings her legs through the crutches. "Besides, there wasn't a whole lot of choice."

He follows her as she glides to the bathroom with the rhythmic tamp of rubber on hardwood. 

"I've done this before, you know," she says.

"I know," he replies sheepishly. "But I'd be lying if I said I didn't like watching it."

"Admiring your handiwork, are you?" she teases. Then, softly, "You should. I wouldn't be doing it if you hadn't thought I was worth the time."

Strong arms encircle her from behind, and warm lips nuzzle the soft flesh behind her ear. "It was my pleasure, darlin," he murmurs, and the sincerity in it makes her chest ache. "One day soon, I'm going to take you slow dancing under those stars."

"I look forward to it."

He sways with her in the quiet dark of the living room, chin resting on her shoulder and breath warm against her ear. "It's so good to see you like this, up and moving and happy. I thought I was going to lose you." His voice is rough and brittle.

"I'm all right, honey. There's no place I'd rather be. Except maybe the bathroom."

She mourns the loss of his warmth when he straightens and releases his hold. He rests his hands on her hips until she's steady on her feet, and then he steps back.

"That toilet's awful low for you," he says as she turns sideways and sidles through the bathroom door.

"Well, unless you're Bob the Builder, there's nothing you can do about it. Weren't you bringing me some nightclothes?"

He nods and slaps the doorframe with his palm. "Yes, I was. Holler when you're ready to come out? I want to spot you." When she opens her mouth to remind her of her previously-established competence in the matter, he dips his chin and raises his palms. "I know, I know. But it's been six months since I've seen you, and I want to fuss over you a bit."

Who is she to protest that? "I'll be a few minutes. I need to brush my teeth and strip off my clothes."

"Ah, a show." He waggles his eyebrows.

"And people say you're a gentleman. Besides, it's nothing you haven't seen before."

"And I've never seen lovelier."

Warmth blossoms in her cheeks. "Leo. And Jim Kirk thinks he's the charmer."

"Jim can have all the charm in the world, but he doesn't have you." The words are swagger and bluster, but the smile he offers her is shy.

"No, he doesn't," she agrees, and wishes she could stroke his cheek. Instead, she tightens her grip on her crutches.

It's ten minutes before she calls to him, and when he pokes his head in, she's down to her bra and panties and shivering on the toilet despite the heat blowing through the floor vent.

"Here you go, darlin'," he says, and hands her an ankle-length, woolen night dress.

"Sexy," she mutters and sets it on her lap. She unhooks her bra.

"Serviceable," he counters with a physician's implacable logic.

She hands him her bra. "Thank you, sugar."

"Welcome. Give me the rest of your clothes, and I'll put them down the laundry chute."

She slips the nightdress over her head and shimmies until the fabric slides over her breasts and belly. Then she reaches for a crutch with which to brace herself while she bends to gather her blouse and skirt from atop her socked feet. "Here you go." She straightens and proffers the tangle of fabric. 

He plucks it from her hand and disappears from view, but he's back in less than a minute. "Let me help you," he says, and steps into the bathroom. "I know you can do it, but your muscles get stubborn when you get cold."

She considers protesting, but doesn't. She is cold, and truth be told, she wants to be held, so she holds out her arms, crutches dangling from her arms like sundered chains, and lets herself be lifted to her feet.

"Hang on to me," he orders, and smooths the nightdress over her stomach and down her legs. "Wrap your arms around my neck, sweetheart. I'm going to carry you out."

When she complies, he wraps his arms around her waist and lifts her feet off the floor. A crutch slips from her arm and clatters to the floor, and a few sidling steps later, the other follows suit.

"Damn," she says.

"Don't worry about it. I'll get it in a minute."

He side-shuffles her out of the bathroom and sets her on her feet, and then he bends at the knees and sweeps her into his arms.

"My wheelchair is back there," she says when he bypasses it in favor of the parlor couch, which has been transformed into a nest of pillows and thick blankets.

"I know," he answers. "And I'll bring it in once I've gotten you settled." He lowers her onto the couch and enfolds her in the underlying blanket, tucking the edge beneath her hip.

"I look like a burrito."

"That's the point. It'll trap your body heat, keep you warm." He pulls a second blanket over her and arranges a third over her feet.

"I'm going to roast."

"You'll be warm, is what you'll be. If you get too warm, just toss one off."

"Dollars to doughnuts, Karl would drag it off and chew it to pieces."

"Mama would nail his hide to the wall. Let me get your chair."

He retreats into the living room and returns with her chair, rolling it before him like a drowsy footman. He parks it within easy reach at the end of the sofa, and then he sidles to and fro and runs his fingers through his hair.

"You need anything else before I turn in?"

"I'm fine, honey." She burrows more snugly beneath the blankets.

He nods. "Well, goodnight, then. I'll see you in the morning. I was thinking maybe after I finished helping Mama, we could take a trip up to Atlanta. Maybe show you something other than the inside of a hospital. It won't look much like you remember it, but there might be some things..." He trails off. "Anyway, there are some pretty patches and some markets you might like. Maybe we can find that honeysuckle soap you like."

"I'd like that."

He nods. "It's settled, then. We'll make a day of it, maybe stay the night. As long as we get back plenty early for the cookout, it should be all right."

"Did you invite Jim?"

"I'm calling him first thing in the morning."

"Think he'll take you up on it?"

He snorts. "'Course he will. Kid's never turned down a free meal." He draws nearer to the sofa. "It's a couple-hour drive to Atlanta. Or we can take the shuttle."

"I'd rather take the truck. More time with you. Plus, I wouldn't have to breathe some guy's recycled chili farts."

"Lest I think you're too much a lady," he says drily, but he's beaming. He bounces on his toes for a moment, and then he bends to give her a final kiss. "Until tomorrow, darlin'," he whispers against her mouth.

"Goodnight."

"'Night."

She rolls onto her side to watch him go, tantalized by the sway of his ass in those jeans. 

_Maybe I'll feel it bunching under my hands tomorrow,_ she thinks, and her stomach flutters with anticipation.

She listens to the muted thump of his feet on the stairs, and when it fades into silence, she closes her eyes and wills herself to sleep.

 

Leonard McCoy finds himself stumbling down the stairs at two-thirty in the morning, blinking sleep from his eyes and clutching the banister with one hand to keep himself from going ass-over-teakettle in the dark. He's not sure what roused him, but he'd thrown back the covers and put his feet on the floor before he'd finished opening his eyes, and his nerves had thrummed with inexplicable adrenaline. 

A soft, mournful sound arrests his attention, and he freezes, one foot hovering uncertainly above the next riser. It would've gone unnoticed by most ears, but he's a doctor, trained to respond to the slightest change in his patients' condition. A simple change in breathing pattern has brought him out of a dead sleep at his desk more than once, and during his rotation in the NICU as a resident, he could be brought on the run from across the room by a distressed mewl from his tiny, premature charges. He knows trouble when he hears it, and it has brought him from his bed with his senses on high alert.

_The dog, maybe,_ he thinks. _Maybe it's somehow locked itself out._

He listens for a moment, but there are no claws scratching dolefully at the front door or a muzzle snuffling at the crack.

"Karl?" he calls anyway. "Is that you, you damn fool of a dog?" It's an irascible hiss in the dark.

The furtive jingle of tags and a rueful whine drift from the parlor, and he relaxes, sure he's found the source of his agitation.

"Damn dog," he mutters, and shakes his head.

Karl whines again, and claws clack on hardwood as he prances to and fro.

"What're you doing? You better not be gnawing on Rosalie's blankets. Mama'll have your hide."

Then he hears it, that soft, mournful sound. It's not the dog. Adrenaline sours his mouth. "Rosalie?"

He darts down the stairs and rounds the corner into the parlor. He can just make out Rosalie's silhouette as she huddles on the sofa in a tangle of blankets, one arm dangling over the edge of the sofa. Karl whines and snuffles at her hand, and her chest hitches with muffled sobs.

"Rosalie, darlin'..." He shooes Karl away and drops to his knees beside the sofa. Karl snorts in canine indignation and wedges himself back into position. "Sweetheart, what's the matter?" He reaches out to stroke one shuddering shoulder.

Her breath hitches. "I thought I was back in the cryotube. It was dark and cramped, and I thought-" A watery sniffle. "I thought it was all a dream. That I was still-"

"Ohhh, darlin'." He throws off her blankets and gathers her into his arms. She's warm, almost feverish, and a panicky voice inside his head whispers that she's relapsed, that the stress of seeing him again has triggered another bout of the flu that had nearly killed her. "Oh, sugar, it's all right," he says, and arranges her on his lap. "I'm right here." He kisses her temple and rocks her in his arms.

"I didn't want to go back in there," she says. Her trembling fingers curl around his shoulder.

Guilt wells in his gut like nausea. "I know you didn't." It hurts to breathe, and his eyes burn.

"I don't understand what I did to make you put me back," she says in a small, bewildered voice, and his heart splinters inside his chest.

"Oh, Rosalie," he manages, and that's as far as he gets before his throat constricts and robs him of the power of speech. His Adam's apple has become a strangling knot, and his ribcage is suddenly far too small, crushing his heart in bony, vengeful fingers.

_Oh, Jesus, oh, Jesus,_ he thinks wildly, and tightens his grip on her. _What am I supposed to do? She thinks she did something to deserve going back into that tin coffin. She thinks I put her in there because I didn't want her anymore. Hell, she's probably thought that since she came to in that godforsaken hospital and realized I wasn't there._

_Well, you do have that habit, Leonard, making promises you can't keep. You promised me the world when you slipped that ring on my finger, and the rice wasn't even out of my hair before I was an afterthought in the life we were supposed to be building together, an inconvenient nuisance to be ignored in favor of your ailing daddy. Five months later, I was a stranger you didn't recognize, and I couldn't take one more of your worthless promises._

_At least you broke those promises to my face. She was unconscious when you slipped the knife between her ribs and twisted in the name of duty. She never felt a thing when you went back on your word and put her back into that cold, lonely prison, never knew what you had done until you'd made your escape with your tail between your legs like a goddamn coward._

_Oh, she knew,_ he counters. _She knew plenty._ A betrayed bleat smothered by a hastily-administered hypo echoes in his mind.

_And you did it anyway,_ Pamela needles. _Just like you deserted her to tend to the whims of that miserable Ventaxian elect. She woke up alone and undefended in a world she no longer understood, and the son of a bitch who sickened her smiled at you over coffee and wine in Jim's stateroom._

An anguished howl of grief played on an endless loop at his desk in sickbay. _Where's my lovely Bones?_

He cradles her head against his shoulder. "You didn't do _anything,_ darlin'. Not a damn thing. You hear me? You can stop thinking that nonsense right now." He'd throw up, but that would mean letting go of Rosalie, deserting her again, and he won't do that, so he closes his eyes and wills his uneasy gorge to settle.

She raises her head to study him with wet, red-rimmed eyes. "Then I don't understand. "Was it just because-" Her brow furrows and her fingers tighten on his shoulder. "-because I'm me?"

"Jesus Christ, Rosalie, no," he answers. "Why would you even think that?"

"My parents-"

"Your parents deserve to burn in hell!" It's too loud in the stillness of the night, but if she finishes the thought, it will tear him apart. 

She starts at his sudden shout. "Then why?"

He doesn't answer. Instead, he rises to his feet with her in his arms.

"What's going on?"

"You need seeing to," he says gruffly and carries her from the parlor with Karl trotting fretfully at his heels. "Stay," he commands him, and when Karl sits and licks his snout with a wet, pink tongue, he grunts and begins his ascent of the narrow staircase.

"You shouldn't yell at him," Rosalie says. "He's been a good cuddle buddy."

"He can cuddle you all he wants," he replies unimpressed by her testimonial. "But I'll be damned if I let him kill us both by tangling in my legs."

"Point taken."

He softens the sharpness of his tongue with a quick peck on the cheek. The last thing he wants is to be hard with her. God knows he's hurt her enough. "I just need to keep you safe, darlin'," he murmurs.

She says nothing as he gains the top of the stairs and carries her to the first door on the right. "This," he says as he crosses the threshold, "is my room."

She raises her head to take in the plain, beige walls and double bed with a thick, wooden headboard of heavily-varnished oak. "Going for early monk, I see."

He snorts. "I've never been much for frills. There used to be a few certificates and such, but I took them with when I set up house with the future ex-Mrs. McCoy. When she got the house and everything in it, she got those, too. I expect they went on the burn pile along with my clothes and anything else I ever gave a tinker's damn about." 

"She sounds like an awful human being."

"She wasn't always," he says. 

"What happened?"

"I did." He sets her on the edge of the bed. "Sit a minute while I get my kit."

"What for?"

"I told you, you need seeing to." _And I have to be sure. I have to be sure you're just worked up and sleep-warm and not coming down with another round of Ventaxian flu._

He takes a moment to turn and close the door, and then he retrieves his medkit from his duffel in front of the bureau. He returns to the bed and drops into a crouch that has become as familiar and comfortable as his morning stretch. It's part and parcel of life with Rosalie, of kissing her and hugging her and looking her in the eye, and God, how he's missed it. His chin drops to his chest, and he takes a deep breath to steady himself. He opens the kit and withdraws his trusty bioscanner.

"I'm not sick," Rosalie says. "If I were, I'd know it."

"You remember being sick, then?" He turns on the bioscanner and waves it over her.

"Fragments. "I remember feeling poorly the morning I went to sickbay. Hot and dizzy and sick to my stomach."

_I'm burning, darlin',_ Rosalie says piteously inside his head, and his stomach clenches and rolls. He sees fever sweat on her flushed, clammy skin and an endless stream of clotted bile retched into sick bowls. The memory of shit-soaked sheets tickles his nostrils.

"You thought it was the flu."

"It was," he says, and Christ if he doesn't sound like Jim when one of his reckless schemes has backfired spectacularly and landed them into a heap of shit, indignant and petulant and bewildered.

"I never doubted your diagnosis. You know a flu when you see one."

Yes, he does, and he's relieved to see that she doesn't have one now. All her counts and vitals are as they should be. The knot of apprehension in the center of his chest loosens with an audible creak. He returns the bioscanner to his kit and runs his fingers through his hair. "You're fine," he says, and reaches out to caress an ankle that's not as bony and fragile as he remembers.

"Anyway, I remember being so hot, like someone had hollowed me out and stuffed me with hot coals. I remember an ice bath, and that was like cold scalpels thrust into my skin. I wanted to get out, but you wouldn't let me."

"I couldn't. I had to keep your core temperature down." It's a plea as much as an explanation, and his fingers rise to a calf that has gained a glimmer of definition. 

Her fingers card through his hair. "You have nothing to apologize for. I was out of my head and in no shape to decide anything. It gets fuzzy after that. I remember a voice in my ear, telling me not to quit, and a heartbeat. There's something else, too, a snatch of conversation I can't quite piece together. All I know is that it makes me feel safe, loved."

He swallows with an effort and cradles her calf in his palm. "That's because it was supposed to. Putting you back into that glorified coffin was the last thing I wanted to do, and I wanted you to know how much I loved you." He rocks forward onto his toes and presses a kiss to one wool-covered knee. "And to forgive me for not being there when you woke up."

"Why weren't you?" No wrathful, wounded accusation, thank God, only curiosity.

He closes his prickling eyes and rests his forehead on her knee. "For the same reason I had to put you into that miserable tube. I didn't have a choice. The Federation chose the _Enterprise_ to host a summit between the Ferengi and the Ventaxians, and the Ventaxian elect refused to board if there were any-" He hesitates, the word a clot of gall in his throat. "-undesirables on board."

"And I was an undesirable without the added bonus of a contagious flu," she says, and the flat, knowing bitterness in it scores his heart.

_While I was up there tending to his every imaginary booboo and fleeting twinge, she was waking up to a wound that went clear to the bone and didn't do it clean,_ he thinks, and curls his arm around her legs.

"That man was a damn fool, and an insufferable one, to boot." He nuzzles her knee, and guilt churns in his gut like cheap rotgut. "I didn't want to do it, and Jim hated it, too, but we couldn't see around it. I offered to set you up in a quarantined shuttle of the starboard bow, and when that didn't work, I tried to resign my post, but the stubborn Ventaxian bastard wouldn't be treated by anyone else."

Her carding fingers still. "You tried to resign your post?"

He nods. "I didn't want to leave you, darlin', send you floating off in some hunk of metal where I could take care of you or be there if something went wrong. Not like I did much good while I was there," he mutters morosely.

"I'm alive, aren't I?" Her fingers resume their idle caress.

"No thanks to me. That was all Dr. Rahood."

"True, but you kept me alive long enough to get there. And you're the one who sent me here to start living again."

He looks up at her. "I never wanted you to wake up alone. Jim told me I could follow you the second negotiations finished, and kept a shuttle on standby, but the Ventaxians' love of hearing themselves was matched only by the Ferengis' dislike of parting with money. I think even Spock was ready to chuck them all out the airlock by the end."

"So why not call? Or write? I checked my email every day, looking for you."

"I was so ashamed that I couldn't stand looking at myself in the mirror. I was afraid to face you. I didn't want to hurt you any more than I already had."

_Or see you looking at me with disappointment and contempt in your eyes like Pamela did near the end, when she got tired of throwing away cold, uneaten dinners and waiting for a someday that wasn't coming. I didn't want to know that I'd ruined you, too._

She cups his face in her hands and coaxes him to follow her as she falls back onto the bed. "You don't have a single thing to be ashamed of, you hear me? You kept me alive and got me to a place where I'd be safe. Yeah, I was mad about it, but my ignorance isn't your fault. You did the best you could, sugar, and I love you for it."

She surveys him through half-lidded eyes. "I did miss my sweet, Southern doctor, though," she purrs, and pulls him into a kiss.

It's slow and sweet as molasses, and he sighs into her mouth and lets his weight settle over her. He reaches down and tugs the nightie above her waist, and then his fingertips skim over the sensitive flesh of her ribs. It's soft and smooth as cream, and she shudders and presses into his touch.

"I've missed you, darlin'," he murmurs against her lips, and when they part, he slips his tongue inside.

Rosalie hums in approval and draws her nails down his back. The slow, possessive scrape is exquisite, and his cock stiffens inside his boxers. 

_Your in your mama's house,_ the scandalized voice of propriety reminds him.

_I'm also thirty-four years old,_ he retorts, and deepens the kiss. He settles a hand on her hip. _Besides, she certainly expected me to conduct a marriage in this room while Daddy was dying downstairs._

"My Bones, darlin'," Rosalie croons when he breaks the kiss. No accusation in her eyes, no sullen resentment, only the quiet love he has missed so much.

He nuzzles her lips and mouths a trail to the hollow of her throat, and the hand at her hip drifts to the inside of her thigh. She gasps when he pushes her underwear aside and teases her folds with a dainty stroke of his finger.

"Ahhh," she hisses, and her hips roll to meet him. She's hot beneath his fingers, and as he continues his unhurried ministrations, she grows slick and needy.

"There's my pretty little sugar," he says as her clit swells against his finger, and he grins when she spreads her legs. "You did miss me, didn't you?" Mmmm."

He eases himself off of her and lies down beside her. His fingers continue their patient work between her legs, and his cock twitches when she keens and splays and jerks against his hand. She's always loved this, his Rosalie, loved being teased and caressed and brought to helpless, stuttering, shameless incoherence. And he loves watching her come apart, loves seeing the realization of her climax dawn in her eyes just before he body slips beyond her control and she jerks and bucks beneath him.

She's moaning steadily now, eyes glassy with lust, and she's so wet, almost as wet as the first time, when he'd taken his time and kindled a fire in every nerve ending before he'd slipped into her and sated his own hunger. He swirls his finger in a languid circle around her distended clit, and she moans and gulps and arches off the bed.

He mouths her temple. "Do you know how beautiful you are, Rosalie?" he whispered, gaze fixed on her face as he torments sensitive, swollen flesh. "Such a pretty little thing, all spread for me. Is this what you missed? Is this what you dreamed of while I was gone?"

"Unnh, unnnh," is her only response, and she thrusts against his fingers.

He growls and flicks out his tongue to tease the nautilus of her ear. "I love you, sweetheart. I'm going to take care of you."

_This is your mama's house,_ the voice of propriety repeats, but it's an argument already lost. His cock is heated iron inside his boxers, and he can smell her, sea salt and warm Risan sand.

_Besides, I have to know. I have to be sure she's really still mine, that this isn't some desperate dream conjured by a guilty conscience and a broken heart._

It had happened far too often on the _Enterprise_ , when he'd woken from a dream of her only to find himself alone in the darkness and silence of his cabin, his arms empty and his chest throbbing with the terrible, cramping ache of loss. It had been so bad in the early days of her absence that he'd often found himself walking the ship, looking for her. He'd known he wouldn't find her, known that she was light years away and drifting further every moment, but he'd looked all the same. He'd prowled sickbay and the adjacent therapy rooms and peeked into the galleys to scare the shit out of puffy-eyed crewmen just coming on shift and fumbling their way through coffee preparation. Sometimes he'd gone to the arboretum and drawn what pitiful solace he could from the memory of their strolls through the foliage.

She's no wistful phantom now, but here and alive beneath his hands, and he won't lose this chance, won't lose her again. He can't. His chest aches at the mere possibility, and steady hands tremble.

"You're wearing too many damn clothes," he rasps, and prays she'll mistake his resurrected grief and terror for arousal.

Rosalie's hips don't cease their needy churning, but she turns to study him. "You all right?" A cool hand caresses his cheek.

He nods. "Yeah. It's just-the last time I touched you, you were-" He takes a shuddering breath.

_Dead. She was dead,_ supplies the relentless voice of irrepressible memory. _Not as dead as Jim, with no vitals and no brain activity and third-degree radiation burns under his clothes, but dead all the same. Her body was breathing, but her soul was going, going, all but gone. She was limp and boneless in your arms, and when you stepped into that hydrotherapy pool with her cradled in your arms, the doctor in you was sure it was goodbye even as the rest of you clung to hope._

"Hey," she whispers, and eases his fingers from between her legs. "Stop, darlin'. Stop hurting yourself." She kisses his slick fingers.

The sight entrances him, and his cock, which had begun to flag under the onslaught of bitter recollection, rises with renewed enthusiasm, a fact which is not lost on Rosalie.

"That get you hard, sweet thing?" Her eyes gleam with the delight of new discovery, and she flicks her tongue against the crease of a knuckle and chuckles when his cock twitches. "Well, ain't that a surprise?" she says, and it's so incongruously prim that he laughs.

"You've sucked my fingers plenty before," he points out, and his cock swells at the memory of taking her on the damp earth on the banks of a Risan lagoon.

"Well, yeah," she admits with a shrug. "But I did it because I liked it. I had no idea it got you all hot and bothered. I thought that was my greedy little cunt."

He growls at the casual obscenity. 

Her lips curl into a wolfish smirk. "Now that I do, I'm going to put that knowledge to such wicked use."

She draws her lips over his index finger, and the tip of her tongue darts out to taste his fingertip. She sighs, and her eyelashes flutter with unspoken pleasure, and damned if it isn't the most erotic thing he's ever seen. He moans helplessly, and his finger twitches with the impulse to thrust into her mouth.

"Be patient." She gives his finger an admonitory nip. "You're the one who needs seeing to now, Dr. McCoy, and I mean to do it properly."

"But I haven't finished seeing to you," he protests.

"Honey, you've been seeing to me since you pulled me out of that cryotube," she says, and her free hand reaches out to caress his cheek and glide down the side of his neck. "Truth be told, I think you've been trying to see to the whole damn world since the day you came into it. I think it's high time someone saw to you."

Her words are gentle despite the lingering lust in her eyes and the restless twitch of unsatisfied desire in her legs. "Rosalie..." 

_I don't deserve this. I don't deserve you. I'm not the man you think I am, and I'll disappoint you, hurt you like I hurt Pamela._

He might not deserve it, but he wants it so badly. He wants this, patience and kindness and a safe place to hide when the world gets too hard and too mean, when it's torn too much from him and he can't spare it another drop of blood and sweat, another pound of flesh. He wants somewhere to go when he can't seem to scrub the blood of a lost patient from his hands or wash their final breath from his hair. He wants arms to hold him when it all goes wrong and lips that won't tear and strip and whittle him to the bone for his every mistake.

And he wants the promise she represents, the hope of a life after Starfleet and five years on Jim Kirk's Wild ride, with a home and a yard and a family. Healthy children and a paddock full of horses and quiet Sunday nights holding hands on the front porch while the sun sinks low and the jasmine and magnolia perfume the air.

"Rosalie," he says again. 

"Sssssh. Let me take care of you, darlin'. Please."

He swallows around a lump in his throat and nods, and the act of surrender is almost as sweet as release. A shuddering sigh escapes him as he relaxes into the mattress. He's immediately rewarded by another swipe of Rosalie's tongue over his finger, and he moans softly.

"I've got you, sweetheart," she murmurs, and then she slurps his finger into her mouth.

"God." It's a guttural bark that dissolves into incoherent moaning when she sets a lascivious rhythm, and he's dimly aware of precum beading on the head of his cock. He reaches down to palm himself through his boxers, but Rosalie bats his hand away.

"No. That's for me to do," she says, and descends on his finger again.

"Please," he begs, and thrusts another finger at her.

Her warm mouth envelops his finger, and his body thrums with pleasure, a slow-burning fire beneath his skin. He sighs as her hand caresses his chest and comes to rest over his heart. She takes his finger to the third knuckle and lets her teeth scrape the sensitive flesh as she withdraws, and his eyelids flutter with the ecstasy of it.

"Oh, God." He wants so much. He wants to touch and taste and bury himself within her. He wants to drag his name from her lips and lose himself in the greedy, fluttering clench of her cunt. He wants to hear the smack of his flesh against her ass and hear his Rosalie sobbing his name into the mattress as he spends himself. He wants to see her fingers clutching the sheets as she gasps and whines and begs for more, harder, deeper. He wants to sink his teeth into her sweat-slick, quivering flesh until she carries the bruise like a brand.

She releases his finger and tugs his boxers to his knees. "You're hungry, aren't you, tiger?" she purrs, and licks her lips.

"My pretty little sugar," he says, delirious with desire, and kicks off his boxers.

She grunts as she clambers on top of him. It's clumsy and graceless, and she deals a glancing blow to his ribs as she straddles him, but it's also a goddamn miracle, because eighteen months ago, she was pale and cold and helpless as a shucked mollusk. He strokes her cheek with reverent, pruned fingers, and pride flares as hot as the lust that consumes him.

She braces herself on his shoulders and uses them to rise to her knees. She slaloms precariously, and he reaches out to stabilize her.

"You did say I was overdressed." She grips her nightdress and tugs it over her head, and then she tosses it aside.

His mouth goes dry at the sight of her, high, round breasts and pale, pink nipples darkening to rose. His mouth waters, and his cock pulses, long and heavy against his belly. Before he can rise to claim a nipple in a gluttonous latch or cup a creamy breast in one broad palm, she descends to kiss him.

"Touch me, darlin'," she breathes into his mouth, and presses her breasts to his chest.

He's only too happy to oblige her. He crushes her to him and ruthlessly plunges his tongue into her mouth, and he fumbles blindly until his groping fingers find the thin elastic of her panties. "You're mine," he growls, and nips her lips until she gasps and bucks against his cock.

She keens and grinds against his length. "Make me. Make me yours again, Leo."

He yanks her panties down to the backs of her knees, and then he hitches her up until his mouth grazes her nipple. "You're mine," he repeats, and teases the swell of her breast with his teeth. "And I'm going to fuck you until you know it." Another scrape of his teeth over the swell of her breasts, and then he soothes the prickling heat with a flick of his tongue.

The moan he coaxes from her is guttural and obscene, and pride swells along with his cock. "You like having your nipples teased, don't you, darlin'?" he needles triumphantly. "You'd let me suck for hours."

_You know damn well she would. You've done it a time or two, just stripped her bare and laid her out on your bed and sucked and licked and teased until she was a sobbing, pleading mess, breasts upthrust and slick and legs spread. It was positively lewd, and the most beautiful sight you'd ever beheld, and neither of you lasted long when you finally relented and finally sank it in. Her breath was hot on your neck as she wailed, and her fingernails bit into your rippling flesh hard enough to draw blood, and it oozed down your back in lazy rivulets as you pounded into her. You've never come harder in your life than you did at the sight of her splayed and trembling beneath you, eyes rolled back in her head and hips jerking with every spasm of her cunt._

_Yeah, well, I just might tonight,_ he thinks as she pants and squirms under his mouth.

"Is that what you want?" He sucks her aureole between his lips, careful to avoid her engorged nipple, which she thrusts impatiently at him. He shakes his head and clucks ruefully at her. "Now, now," he chides. "You said you wanted to take care of me, didn't you? Didn't you?" he prompts when she offers no reply.

"Yes."

"That's right," he says. "My memory is almost as steady as my hands." He rewards her cooperation and honesty with a slow lap of her nipple and relishes the resulting moan and twitch. "You know how you can take care of me, my pretty little sugar?"

He watches her throat work as she struggles to form a coherent answer, but all that emerges is a strangled whine, and she tries to press her breast to his lips.

He draws back as far as the mattress will allow. "Ah, ah. Not until you answer me."

She moans in frustration and rocks against his length, and good God Almighty, she's so wet. He's tempted to slip inside her and ride her from below until she grips him in that glorious, sucking clench and the world goes white and there's nothing in it but her cocooning heat and the protective, possessive coil of her body, but that's not how he wants this to end, and so he restrains himself and waits for her reply.

"Mm. Mm." Her hips roll faster and faster, up and down his shaft. 

"No cheating," he admonishes, and reluctantly stays her hips. "You answer me, now, Rosalie. I promise you won't regret it."

"No," she says at last. "No, I don't. Leo, darlin', please. I need you."

"I know," he soothes. "And seeing as I _am_ a doctor, I have a moral imperative to relieve suffering."

He finally takes a plump nipple into his mouth and gives it a vigorous suck, and Rosalie stiffens. He hears the scrabbling scrape of her fingernails in the sheets, and her mouth opens in a soundless gape. She tries to rut against his cock, but he refuses to relinquish his hold on her hips. 

"Mmmmmmmm. Sweeter than strawberry wine," he says as she writhes in his grasp. "I wonder what the rest of you tastes like?"

She shudders. "Please."

"I'm in no hurry. I'm home. I've got all the time in the world." He takes his time, suckles first one nipple and then the other, and takes unrepentant delight in her moans. Her cries are getting louder, and he knows it won't be long until she's rattling the windows.

He gives her left breast a final suck and slowly rolls her onto her back. "Hello, darlin'," he says, and caresses her cheek. She's gorgeous, hair fanned over the bed in a golden corona and her eyes wide and dark with lust. Lips pink as dawn's first light and plump with his kisses and pale thighs parted to reveal her slick cunt. He cups a stiff-peaked breast in his hand and bends to mouth her throat. "I love you," he whispers against her throat.

Her hand cups the back of his head. "I'm still yours, Leo. Always."

He hums and mouths a lazy trail down her chest and belly. Her skin ripples into gooseflesh beneath his worshipful lips, and she arches to meet him. He pauses his descent to dip the tip of his tongue into her navel. She twitches and mewls, and her fingers curl into his hair.

He gives her navel another indolent flick and slides her panties to her ankles. "The way you can take care of me, darlin'," he tells her as she kicks her feet in an attempt to dislodge her irksome underclothes, "is to let me have my filthy way with you. I'm going to take you until you can't move anymore, and then I'm going to ride you into the mattress. Who knows? Maybe I'll even put it up your ass."

Her breath hitches in surprise, and her belly jumps beneath his mouth. "Jesus Christ, Leo."

"What? You can't tell me the thought's never crossed your mind." She swallows, and he knows by the way her eyes darken and shift that it most certainly has, and probably more than once. He chuckles, amused. "Of course it has. You're the most dirty-minded woman I've ever met. Why didn't you say anything?"

She shrugs. "Wasn't sure you'd be interested. That, and I wasn't sure of the logistics. That's not a Q-tip you're packing, honey."

He guffaws. "Well, thank you for the compliment. As for the logistics, we'll figure it out. And as to the interest? Oh, honey, there's no part of you that I don't want." He mouths the tiny freckle just below her navel and delights in her shiver. "As for right now, I'm going to spread you wide and make your eyes roll back in your head."

He slips a hand behind her knee and pushes her leg up and to the side. Her body resists at first, spooked by the sudden change in position, and he nuzzles the crease of her thigh until she relaxes.

"There's my girl," he encourages as her bent leg slowly drifts outward to allow him greater access, and he further entices her by teasing her swollen folds with a brush of his lips. "Spread for me, sugar."

She gasps and keens, and her other leg bends by slow, painstaking degrees until she's fully exposed to him, clean and slick, the lush heart of a forbidden rose. 

"Please, love," she entreats him, and reaches between her legs with trembling fingers to open herself to him.

She is his love, the sweetest, fiercest love he's ever known, and so he settles himself between her thighs and braces his elbows against her thighs to hold them in place, and then he dips his head and tastes of her.

The groan the first stroke of his tongue pulls from her is primordial, the yowl of a cat in heat, and she bows on the bed and presses her cunt against his face. "God, Leo," she moans, guttural and wanton, and writhes. The muscles of her thighs flex beneath his elbows.

She tastes so good, nectar and ambrosia, and he gluts himself on her, on the honeyed heat of her cunt and the smoothness of her skin and the garbled, broken music of her cries. He can change the pitch and duration of them according to the capricious whims of his tongue. A long, firm stroke with the broad flat of his tongue elicits a protracted, uneven moan from the pit of her stomach, deep and vibrato and portentous as the shift and grind of tectonic plates. Long, soft strokes produce high, breathless cries and incoherent pleading. Short, sharp jabs with the narrowed point of his tongue earned him shrill, stuttering squeaks akin to the squeaking of bedsprings, and light, fluttering flicks garnered cracked, soundless huffs. 

He teases and coaxes her, composes arias with his tongue, and Rosalie, bless her soul, sings for him. Her fingers bunch in the bedclothes, and her hips jerk and rock against his mouth. He glances up to see her head thrown back, the cords in her neck taut and straining. Her mouth hangs in a desperate gape. It's glorious and exhilarating and beautiful, and he wishes like hell he could preserve the moment forever.

_You're alive,_ he exults as she pulses against his tongue, and with every cry he wrenches from her lips, every twitch and scrabble and mindless exhortation for more, darlin', more, the guilt he's carried in his heart since the instant that cryotube sealed over her unconscious face fades. She's here and she's his, and she loves him still.

He brings her to the precipice again and again, licks and taps and sucks and nibbles until her body tenses and thrums with impending climax, only to stop at the last moment. It's not cruelty that moves him, but a desire to prolong this moment for as long as possible. He wants to remember this as clearly as he remembers their first dance and their first kiss and the first bite of her peach hand pie. He wants to remember this as vividly as he remembers the terrible heaviness of her in his arms as he cradled her to him in the hydrotherapy pool and the sound of her crying out for him from a lonely bed at Emory University Hospital.

_Where's my lovely Bones?_

She's hyperventilating now, rapid, shallow breaths that rush from her throat in quick succession, and he can feel her thundering heartbeat in her thighs and pulsing clit. "Please, Leo!" It's a helpless wail tinged with ragged desperation, and when he raises his eyes, there are tears streaming down her face.

"Please!" Her hands cup and knead her breasts as though that will alleviate the endless, exquisite torment between her splayed legs, and he damn near comes at the sight.

He grunts, and the inarticulate pleasure vibrates against her swollen folds and distended clit. She bows on the bed, and her legs begin to twitch and shake. This time, he doesn't stop, but instead sucks her clit into his mouth and hums.

She seizes beneath him, muscles locked and spasming, and the cry that escapes her is high and shrill and ululating, surprise and ecstasy and blessed, blind relief. He releases her thighs to keep her from tearing her groin in the convulsive throes of her climax, and his arm snakes up to place a restraining hand on her shoulder. He'd learned early that CP intensified the spasmodic reflex; once Rosalie started to climax, the ability to control her movements vanished, and she was at the mercy of her body until it stopped. If he weren't careful, she'd jerk herself clean off the bed or tear a lat, and wouldn't that be a fine thing to explain to his mother and the emergency-room doctor on call?

"Leooooo." An endless, subterranean growl that wraps around his dripping, straining cock like lascivious, velvet fingers, and his mouth fills with her with every clench of her cunt. Freed from the weight of his elbows, her hips buck and grind against his face. "Yes, Leo, more," she demands greedily, and her hand comes to rest on the back of his head and hold him in place while she rocks against his mouth.

"God," she groans drunkenly, and sags bonelessly against the mattress.

_Understatement,_ he thinks with drugged wonder. He favors her with a few more indolent flicks of his tongue just to watch her mewl and shudder, and then he eases his head from beneath her slack hand and slithers up her limp body to pillow it on her shoulder.

"You like that, darlin'?"

"What do you think?" she slurs, and blinks at him with logy satisfaction.

His only response is a smug chortle.

"What about you?"

"We're going to get to that in a minute," he assures her, and rolls his hips to drag his cock along her outer thigh. "I just want to make sure you're all right."

"Right as rain," she says, and kisses him. He's covered in her from nose to chin, but it doesn't deter her enthusiasm. In fact, it only seems to further inflame it. She purrs and flicks her tongue into the corners of his mouth, and then it slips inside to caress his own.

It's his turn to shiver. He moans and plunges his hands into the tousled silk of her hair and frots against her leg. Her tongue slithers over his, oil and smoke, and she groans exultantly at the taste of sea salt and Risan sand in the back of his throat.

"There something you want, sugar? Something you need, maybe?" She grins and shimmies against his aimlessly-rutting cock.

He hisses. "You know damn well what I want." He chases her mouth and captures it in a bruising, possessive kiss. 

_Mine,_ he thinks. _My pretty little rose._

"What's stopping you from taking it, then?"

He pins her with a searing, predatory gaze. "That what you want? For me to take it?"

Without waiting for an answer, he rolls her onto her belly and yanks her ass into the air. "Get your knees under you," he orders. "And your elbows."

Rosalie is ever obedient, and soon, she's before him with her ass in the air and her spine bowed in a seductive curve that makes his cock twitch. He drinks in the sight of her for a long, delicious moment. His tongue darts out to moisten his lips, and his hand curls around his cock.

"So goddamn beautiful," he growls, and gives himself a slow tug. "All wet and aching and waiting just for me."

She whines in the back of her throat and deepens the inviting bow of her spine, and he savors the delectable sway of her breasts.

He crawls forward and mouths her flank, nips and bites and skims with the edges of his teeth until her skin begins to ripple, and then he sucks the indentations between his lips and salves them with the delicate flutter of his tongue. 

"Mine," he says, and sinks another claim into the swell of her ass. She flinches at the smarting sting of his teeth, but doesn't pull away, nor does she deny the truth of his statement.

He kisses and mouths his way along the supple ridge of her spine until he reaches the nape of her neck, and then he rests his hands on her hips and aligns himself with her wet heat. "Easy, sweetheart, easy," he murmurs against the side of her throat as she hitches under him like a spooked filly. He nuzzles the soft flesh at the crook of her neck, and when she whimpers and bares her throat, he sinks his teeth into it and pushes into her.

She utters a short, sharp bark and tightens around him, and oh, God, it's so hot and sweet. He holds her flesh between his teeth as he pulls back and sinks into her again, and the corresponding clutch of her cunt makes him light-headed. 

"Grab the headboard," he barks, and when she's stretched and anchored before him, he slips his arms around her and cups her breasts. "That's it," he says as she arches and moans, and sets a short, brutal rhythm, each thrust snapping her hips forward.

He's never had anything like this, never felt such desire. He's delirious with it, dry-mouthed and too hot inside sweat-slick skin.

_Fever dream,_ he thinks as his hips snap and plunge him into that sucking slickness. _Whatever caught her caught me, and now I'm burning, too._

If this is the purgatory of impending death, then let it have him. He is with his Rosalie, and she is snug and hot around him, and he can't think of a more joyous way to go.

"Is this what you wanted, darlin'?" he asks as he drives into her.

She's beyond speech now. Her only response is a garbled, warbling squawk. Her hips meet his thrusts with an unsteady jerk, and her bloodless, clutching fingers squeak against the wooden headboard as it beats a triumphant staccato against the wall.

_Not quite there,_ he thinks. _The angle's wrong. She likes it deep._

"I'm going to take care of you, sweetheart," he whispers into her sweat-slick skin. "Turn loose of the bed now."

She does, and he eases her back onto his steadily-pumping cock, one arm laced around her middle and the other tucked beneath her bobbing breasts.

Her reaction is immediate and exquisite. She throws her head back and moans. "Leo, God almighty."

"That what you wanted, sugar? Mmm?" He mouths the side of her neck and palms a swaying breast. "You wanted me to sink it deep?"

Her eyes widen, and she rises and falls in counterpoint to his increasingly-erratic strokes. "Yes. Yes, darlin', yes, yes." Her thighs tremble with exertion, but she's close. He can sense it in the sudden tightness of her belly beneath his arm and in her ragged, shallow breaths.

_Just a little more._ "My filthy little sugar," he says, and looses a stuttering moan when she flutters around him. "Yeah, yeah," he pants, and tweaks a nipple. "Oh, sweet darlin'." He slips his hand between her legs to tease her clit and gasps when she jerks and ruts against his fingertips. "C'mon, Rosalie," he begs, and buries himself within her. "Show me. Show me you're still mine." He releases her breast and thrusts his fingers into her mouth.

She stiffens and jerks, and then she comes, the guttural roar of her release vibrating along his invading fingers. The slick, greedy heat of her cunt pulses around him as she rocks and howls around his fingers, and it's too much. He comes with a muffled cry, his face buried in the crook of her shoulder as his hips buck and drive his seed into her. It goes on and on and on, until his muscles burn and his bones feel soft as tallow inside his skin. 

"You still mine, darlin'?" he asks shyly as his cock twitches feebly with the last of his spend.

She huffs laughter and reaches up to twine an arm around his neck in a languid embrace. "Always."

He hums and laps salt from her skin. "That mean you'll come back to the ship with me? I know it's selfish of me to ask, what with your furry admirer downstairs, but-" He nuzzles her soft flesh. "I don't want to be without you. Your quarters are just as you left them," he says, as though a spartan, grey cubicle aboard a spaceship is a tantalizing inducement. "I know it doesn't hold a candle to what you have here, and I wouldn't blame you if you said no."

"It has you, honey. That'll beat all every time."

He gives her a gentle squeeze and grins. "Looks like Jim isn't the only one who can lay it on thick."

His elation is interrupted by a sharp rap upon the door. "Leonard Horatio McCoy, what in the hell are you doing in there?" comes his mother's waspish voice.

He freezes, a teenager caught in the act. "Uh." He blinks stupidly at the door and wracks his brain for a plausible reply. "Nothing. Just some experimental therapy," he offers, and prays she doesn't open the door. If she does, she's going to know more about her baby boy than either of them ever wanted her to.

There's a prolonged and decidedly skeptical silence from behind the door. "Well, do me a favor and lower the volume on that "'therapy'. I have to get up in the morning. So do you if you're still of a mind to help."

"I am. Sorry, Mama."

A furtive creak from a cantankerous floorboard. "It's all right. Goodnight, son."

"'Night, Mama."

"Love you," she says, and then she's shuffling back to the blessed quiet of her bedroom.

On his lap, Rosalie dissolves into helpless giggles. "Busted," she snorts. "I don't know how I'm going to face her in the morning."

"You? It isn't your mama," he reminds her, and eases her onto her knees. "Grab the headboard a minute until I can get out from under you."

"Like you've never been busted before."

"I haven't. Not in the house." He backs away to give her room to move. "All right. You can drop to all fours now." She does as bid, and he coaxes her backwards until she can lie flat and roll onto her side. "You all right? You sore anywhere?"

"I'm pleasantly worn out, is what I am." She reaches out to stroke his wrist. "So this is a first for you?"

"It is."

She smiles sleepily at him, and the happiness in it makes his chest ache.

_Sweetheart, I have a feeling you're going to give me plenty of firsts,_ he thinks, and in his mind's eye, he sees her sitting on the front porch of a house on the back forty, with a glass of sweet tea in one hand and a swollen belly beneath a maternity smock.

"Let me see to you. I marked you up pretty good." He slips off the bed and narrowly avoids stepping on his medkit.

"You'll note I didn't put up much of a fuss."

"Well, that's because you weren't sitting on them. You might not be so enamored after two hours in a truck." He rummages in his kit for a tiny jar of salve and a dermal regenerator.

"You might want to give me an emergency contraceptive. I haven't been on birth control since my unscheduled departure. I guess the braintrusts at Emory never figured on me getting lucky."

"The braintrusts at most hospitals are shockingly lacking in imagination," he mutters. "I've been on my end of it, so the odds are low, but we'll stop at the pharmacy on the way to Atlanta in the morning. It's well within the seventy-two-hour window. It'll make your cycle come within a few days."

"Better than the alternative."

"Not the maternal kind?" he says lightly, and quietly, wistfully reevaluates his hopeful daydream.

She shrugs. "I thought about it, sure. Played house and dolly. But it was made pretty clear that wishful thinking was all it was likely to be, or should be. It'd be selfish and irresponsible for someone like me have a baby."

"What?" He squeezes a dollop of salve onto his fingers and rubs it onto a nip mark on her flank.

"It's not like I could take care of it or run after it. Maybe I could with specialized equipment and a nanny, but that cost a pretty penny, and anyway, I didn't see the point of bringing a child into the world if someone else was going to bring it up."

"Goddamn barbarians," he mutters, and dabs more salve on another red mark. 

"Who?"

"Whoever decided money should decide whether someone can have a child or not. If you want them and can have them, then dammit, that should be the end of it." He finishes applying the salve, replaces the cap on the tube, and drops it into his kit. "Do you want them?"

"Like I said, I never gave it much thought. "Can I? Biologically, I mean."

"There's no reason you couldn't. Your ovaries, fallopian tubes, and uterus are normal, and your cycles are regular. No hormone imbalances that I can find. Now that you've gotten stronger, you should have no problem carrying to term." He picks up the dermal regenerator and clicks it on.

"Now all I need is someone to have one with," she muses.

"Don't imagine you'd have to look that far," he says idly, but his heart is hammering inside his chest.

"That an offer, Dr. McCoy?"

"Maybe it is," he answers, and adjusts the intensity of the regenerator. He holds it over the largest bruise and watches the insulted flesh begin to mend.

She reaches for his free hand. "Well, if it is, then I'd be honored to accept. But I'm afraid I'm a traditional woman."

"Oh?" His hand is steady, but he can't repress a smile.

"I am. Which means you'll have to finish your suit."

His smile broadens into a grin. "I intend to, Miss Walker. A lady such as yourself deserves nothing less."

"Your Kirk is showing again."

He snorts. "Trust me, honey, the kid isn't that refined." He raises the regenerator to her shoulder, but she shies from it.

"Leave it. I don't sit on my shoulder, and I like knowing it's there."

"Suit yourself," he says, but he's secretly pleased. He returns the regenerator to his kit and crawls into bed behind her. He hums in satisfaction and tucks her into all his curves and loose angles, and then he reaches down and tugs the covers over them. Rosalie needs them to retain heat, and he's determined that she be safe and comfortable.

"Did you mean it?" he asks as the quiet darkness settles over them. "When you said you'd come back to the ship with me?"

"Leonard McCoy," she huffs. "I've never lied to you before, and I'm not about to start now." She's quiet for a moment. "Did you mean it about going to Atlanta tomorrow, and about loving by the creek?"

He buries his face in the crook of her neck. "Every word of it. I'm going to parade you through that city like the queen you are, and then I'm going to buy you some pretty clothes. You shouldn't be making do with hospital-issue drawers."

She cackles into the pillow. "Now I know you're home. You just said 'drawers.'"

"It's a perfectly serviceable word."

"I think you just want to see me in lingerie."

"So what if I do? And get it right: it's pretty drawers."

She dissolves into breathless, tittering laughter, and he gladly joins her. Laughter means life, and he intends to revel in it.

He meant what he said about finishing his suit, too. He has five days left here on his home soil, and he's determined to make the most of them. Pretty drawers and love by the creek are the least of it. He's going to court like his life depends on it because it does. She's his second chance, his miracle plucked from the stars, and she holds his heart in her small, palsied hands. If he's lucky, this will end in wedding lace and rice sprinkled in her long, golden hair, in Mrs. McCoy and baby's breath and happily ever after.

_And if it doesn't?_ Pamela asks.

If it doesn't, what's left of his heart will shatter inside his chest and he'll spend the rest of his life mourning what could've been, but at least he'll have left Rosalie better than he found her and with a heart full of joyful memories, a taste of what love should be.

"Goodnight, darlin'," she whispers, and burrows closer.

"Goodnight, sweetheart."

His body uncoils to the deep and steady rhythm of her breathing, and when sleep claims him, he dreams of sweet tea and babies and the companionable creak of a front porch swing.


	4. Sweet Southern Comfort

It's quarter-past six when Len shuffles down the stairs and into the kitchen. It's late by Eleanora's standards, but she's not about to complain. Her boy is home, and if that means a little more time, so be it.

"Morning, sugar," she says, and bustles toward the coffeepot.

"Morning, Mama," he grunts, and offers her a sleepy smile. His hair is combed and still damp from his shower, and the sleeves of his flannel shirt are rolled to the elbows.

"You sure you want to go with me?" she asks as she retrieves a mug from the cupboard and pours him a cup of coffee. "You look like most of you's still in bed."

"I said I would," he answers stubbornly, and rubs his bleary eyes.

"You won't be much use if you go facedown into the dirt," she counters prosaically, and reaches for the creamer.

"I'll be fine. I've done worse in med school."

She dumps four spoonfuls of sugar into the cup and gives it a vigorous stir. "You were twenty-three in med school."

He raises an eyebrow. "And? I'm thirty-four, not ninety."

"Don't get all ruffled on me now," she says placidly, and carries the mug to the table and sets it in front of him. "I'm just saying it's not as easy to shrug off once you get north of thirty."

He accepts the coffee with an appreciative hum. "And yet, here you are, spry as a lark."

"I went to bed at a decent hour," she retorts drily, and Len's cheeks flush.

"I went to bed plenty early," he protests, and takes a sip of coffee. "The first time, anyway. Rosalie had a nightmare, and I heard her fussing."

"So you brought her upstairs with you?"

He nods. "I guess she thought she was in the cryotube again," he says quietly, and she can hear the guilt in it.

"Len, baby, if she was in there, it was because she needed to be."

A long sip of coffee. "Yeah."

_Bless you, honey,_ she thinks as she watches his gaze turn inward. _The fact that it's the truth doesn't make a damn bit of difference. You're still going to chew yourself up and turn yourself inside out with what you think you should've done differently, torture yourself with the idea that there must've been a better way, a kinder one._

"If she's giving you hell about it, then she ought to be ashamed," she says stoutly.

A sardonic huff. "She thinks I'm being a fool."

"Well, then, she's got some sense."

"Trust me, Mama, she's got more than some." Pride, bright as gold in the summer sun, and a softer, sweeter note that she recognizes all too well.

_You knew he loved her. You saw that much in those photos he sent from Risa, where he knelt in the purple sand and looked at her with such undisguised adoration, and you heard its desperate ring when he commed you in the middle of the night to tell you she was dying. And like you told her in that come-to-Jesus meeting in this very kitchen, Len didn't send just anybody here to eat at the table where he did so much of his growing up and sleep in the house where he found the bones of his dreams. He was moved by love and fragile hope._

_Still, you weren't sure what you had, not until he came up the drive with those roses in his hand and his heart written all over his face. Len has always been a soft touch, and when he takes a shine to someone, there's nothing he won't do to see to them, even if it scores him to the bone. It's a hallmark of a natural-born healer, you suppose, to take on the burdens and hurts of those they tend, and no one takes on more than Len. He'd suffocate under the weight of assumed grief if there weren't sensible folks with harder hearts to pull him back. It's a trait that's saved lives and bettered so many others, but it's also cost him so much, left wounds that you suspect will never heal and filled his heart with wellsprings of guilt that no amount of common sense will ever touch and his head with ghosts he'll never banish._

_So when he came through that kitchen door and hit his knees, your heart dropped into your toes, and you could only pray that it wasn't the prelude to another broken heart, another stinging, bitter humiliation for a good man who deserved more tenderness than life had dealt him. You could've cried when Rosalie proved to be just as soft and granted him the patience and mercy Pamela never had, cupped his face in her hands and whispered that she missed him, darlin'. One touch of her hand, and all the tension bled from him like a spent breath._

_And how Len doted on her! He's always been polite--you raised him to be a decent human being, after all, and his daddy instilled in him the importance of treating every woman like a lady--but you'd never seen him like he was last night. Maybe some of it was on account of her problem, her clumsy hands and occasionally-intransigent muscles, but simple doctor's compassion wouldn't explain his single-minded devotion. He scarcely took his eyes off of her the whole night, and asking him to turn loose of her was like asking water not to be wet. He nudged her utensils within her grasp and made sure she had everything she wanted before he saw to himself. She was the be-all end-all of his world, and when he rolled her onto the porch and bundled her in a blanket on the swing, he was sixteen and in the doe-eyed throes of first love. The way he looked at her was the way you looked at David all those years ago, with your heart in your throat and buoyant with the certainty that you could fly if only he would say your name._

_And if you needed any more proof, there was the ruckus last night._

_Ruckus. That's one way of putting it,_ she thinks, and it's her turn to blush as her ears echo with the unmistakable sounds that had drifted from her son's room. She should hardly be surprised, she knows; Len's her baby, but his childhood is far behind him, and if he were like the other boys of his time, he left his virginity in the trampled earth of a secluded spot before he finished high school. And even if he were a fumbling innocent on his wedding night, he certainly wasn't after. It's not something she wants to consider too closely. Suffice it to say, she was surprised he chose to take such liberties under her roof.

_Six years ago, he didn't take such liberties under your roof, and it cost him his marriage,_ the voice of conscience reminds her, and she concedes the point and goes to pour herself a second cup of coffee.

_Besides, you know damn well love finds a way. You and David got up to plenty of business when your folks weren't home. The only difference was you managed to be quieter about it. It's been too damn long since Len had someone to fuss over and be sweet on him. What does it matter if he gets up to some loving behind closed doors? He's a grown man no matter how much your mama's heart wants to deny it and see him as a tousle-haired kid in short pants, and you know life ain't much worth living if there's no one to spend it with. Let him be and just be glad he's got color in his cheeks and a proud twinkle in his eye._

She stirs four spoonfuls of sugar into her coffee and takes a sip. "You want me to make you a fried egg?"

He shakes his head. "I'll wait until we get back. I want Rosalie to get a good breakfast before we head out."

"Where to?" She sets her cup on the counter and reaches for her cast-iron skillet.

"I was hoping to borrow a truck and take her on up to Atlanta, maybe stay the night."

"Were you now? And what if I said no?" she teases. She turns and sidles to the refrigerator.

He shrugs. "I guess I'd figure out something else. Maybe show her around the farm, take her fishing at the creek."

"She like fishing?" She opens the refrigerator and retrieves a carton of eggs from the door slot.

"She used to go with her Uncle Beau when she was a kid. Never caught much, but she had fun." He takes a sip of coffee. "I can take her to Atlanta the day after tomorrow. Rent a car or take a shuttle."

"You're set on taking her there, aren't you?"

"It's her home. Or it was. I know there's not much left that she remembers, but maybe there'll be something. Something better than the long-term ward at Emory, anyway."

Her nose wrinkles in distaste at the memory of the ward and the sour smell of old urine and unwashed bodies. The dingy linens and diseased, wan light from the fluorescent bulbs had drained the life from the hapless souls who shuffled up and down the aisle in listlessly-flapping johnnies and drab scrubs, and the pale, silent wraith she'd met there had borne little resemblance to the vibrant, contented woman currently drowsing in her son's childhood bed.

"How they expect folks to live like that, I don't know," she declares, and reaches for the butter. She closes the refrigerator door and carries her haul to the counter beside the stove.

"Living's the optimum outcome, but if they can't get it, they'll settle for survival. Doctors aren't picky."

She sets her skillet on the burner, unwraps the stick of butter, and smears the end over the bottom of the pan. "Well, don't you stick me in a place like that, Leonard McCoy. If I ever get too feeble to do for myself, you just stick me in a patch of sunlight and let nature take its course." She turns on the burner with a flick of her wrist.

"If you ever get down, Mama, George and I'll take care of you," he says, and there's a brittle note of panic in it that makes her heart ache.

_Dammit, Eleanora, you've stirred up the biggest damn ghost in his mental closet,_ she chastises herself, and punishes the egg in her hand with a sharp tap against the side of the skillet. "Rosalie up yet?" She drops the contents of the egg in the center of the pan.

"She wasn't when I came down. I figure she could use a chance to sleep in."

"After your vigorous therapy last night?" She shakes the heavy skillet to keep the egg from sticking to the well-seasoned iron. 

He splutters into his coffee. "I, uh, I'm sorry about that, Mama," he says, and she hears the furtive rasp of palm on nape. "I didn't mean to wake you."

"Don't worry about it, sugar. You're grown now and can decide what you want to do behind closed doors. Just do your old mama a favor and keep it down. I love you, son, but there are some secrets you need to keep."

"Yes, Mama," he says sheepishly. 

"Bring me a plate or two?"

The thump of ceramic on wood and the scrape of the latter on the floor, and then Len is on her left, warm skin and damp hair and Ivory soap. From the corner of her eye, she sees a flash of red-and-black checked flannel as he opens a nearby cupboard and reaches inside for a plate. 

"Make it two."

"Yes'm. But why?"

"Because you're eating an egg." When he opens his mouth to protest, she barrels over him. "'But Rosalie', I know. Trust me, honey, you'll have plenty of appetite left over after this egg, and even if you don't, you'll work one up walking the fences. I've got you for five days, and I'll be damned if I'm not going to fatten you up."

Len blinks at her in consternation and looks himself up and down. "I'm hardly skin and bones," he says mildly. "In fact, I'm at my ideal weight according to all medical guidelines."

"Those guidelines can take a flying leap," she counters flatly. "I'm your mama, and I know when you need to eat."

"Yes, Mama," he says meekly, and gathers a second plate.

"Especially if you're planning any more of those intensive therapy sessions," she says blandly.

"Mama!" Len sputters, scandalized, and flushes crimson to the roots of his hair.

She chuckles grubbily, unbecomingly pleased at his discomfiture, and tips the fried egg onto the nearest plate. "Pepper's on the table if you want it. You want salt?"

He shakes his head. "Too much salt'll kill you."

"And a little never hurt anybody. Besides, you're going to live to be a hundred. Longevity is in your blood." She reaches for a second egg and raps it smartly against the side of the skillet.

"Provided I don't spill it all on some godforsaken planet," he grumbles, and carries his plate to the table.

"Leonard McCoy, don't you dare say a thing like that!" she snaps. The thought of losing her youngest boy inspires a swooning dread that makes her heart race.

_You know you could, too,_ whispers a rabbity, maternal voice inside her head. _Not because he's reckless; Len is an even-handed, thoughtful old soul, has been since he was knee-high to a grasshopper. No, you could lose him because his heart is too big, because he cares too much. There's nothing he wouldn't do for those he calls his own, and very little he wouldn't do for a stranger. If push came to shove and there was a sacrifice to be made, Len would make it, and if by chance he didn't draw the short straw, he'd wrest it from the fingers of the one who did._

_So yes, you could lose your boy. That tin can he rides the cosmos in could be blown out of the firmament by an attack or an unexpected warp-core failure, or that gun-slinging manchild he calls a best friend could talk his way into a mess he can't gamble his way out of and get them all blown to Kingdom Come. Your fine young man could come back in a silver, flag-draped coffin or not at all, and all you'd have to show for it is a posthumous medal and a worthless letter of condolence from the fool who got him killed._

A warm hand on her shoulder. "I'm sorry, Mama," he says quietly.

"Nothing to be sorry for." She shakes her head and pats his hand as it rests on her shoulder. "You go on and eat before it gets cold." She gives the skillet a vigorous shake. "Your girl going to be all right up there?" She tips her egg onto a plate and turns off the stove.

"I don't see why not."

"It's just that she's never been up those stairs before. You think she could get down if she had to?" She snags the salt from its cabinet and carries her spartan breakfast to the table.

Len's brow furrows. "Like in a fire, you mean?" A bite of egg hangs limply from the tines of his fork, and bright yellow yolk drips onto his plate.

"I was thinking more along the lines of if she needed to go to the bathroom or decided she was tired of lying there," she answers sedately, and sprinkles salt over her eggs like anointing oil. "But I suppose your doomsday scenario works, too."

Len slouches over his plate and finishes the bite of egg. "I know it's not likely. It's just that Rosalie's reflexes are a lot slower than most folks', and if she ever had to get out in a hurry, I don't think she could." His gaze drifts ceilingward, and she knows he sees tongues of licking, red flame and billows of suffocating, black smoke.

"You don't have to tell me. Before you got her that medication, there were more peas on the floor than made it into the bowl."

"Miserly bastards," he grunts thunderously, and grimaces at the unthinking obscenity.

She lets it pass and cuts into her egg with the side of her fork. "You can take whatever truck you want so long as you bring it back same as you found it."

He dips his head in thanks. "Of course."

"And don't you even think of skipping out on the barbecue." She wags her fork at him, and yolk spatters the table like flecks of spittle. "George'd never let me hear the end of it, and Abbie's been out of her mind since she knew you were coming."

He groans. "I can feel my back already."

"Oh, hush," she says indulgently. "It's one time in five years, and who knows how long it'll be after that? Besides, you're going to need the practice for your own younguns."

She waits for his customary denial of the possibility and its attendant pang of disappointment, but it doesn't come. Instead, a shy smile twitches on his lips, and a soft blush creeps across the bridge of his nose.

_Oh, Len, honey._ Hope rises and flutters inside her chest, buoyant and heady as incense.

She hums as she finishes her egg, and fifteen minutes later, the table is cleared, and the dishes are drying in their racks.

"You ready?" She's behind her self-imposed schedule, and Len or not, those fences need checking. One gap, and she'll be corralling curious and adventuresome critters for days.

"Yes'm. Just let me check on Rosalie?"

He's gone before she can say yea or nay, and soon after, she hears the low murmur of voices. The heavy tread of footsteps on the stairs, and Len appears with Rosalie in his arms. She's tousle-haired and puffy-eyed and, judging by her logy, gimlet-eyed expression, none too pleased about her current state of consciousness.

"I know it was warm under the blankets, darlin'," Len says. "And I'm sorry for pulling you out. But I've got to help Mama walk the fences this morning, and I don't want to leave you where you can't get out if you need to." He presses a placatory kiss to her tangled crown.

_Oh, good heavens,_ Eleanora thinks.

Rosalie, apparently of a similar mind, grunts peevishly at him.

"I know it's a pain in the a-behind," he says, unfazed by her unintelligible protest, and casts a furtive glance at her to ascertain whether her ears caught his near-slip. "But it's only for a little bit, and when I come back, we'll have a proper breakfast, and I'll help you take a real shower if you want."

Rosalie harrumphs and squints balefully at him, but her hand is gentle when it caresses his nape.

"Morning, Rosalie," Eleanora says.

"Morning, Mother McCoy. Forgive me for coming out here so disheveled." She scowls at Len and makes a futile attempt to pat down her hair.

"Honey, no one looks good at six in the morning."

" _He_ looks fresh as a daisy," she points out, and favors Len with another scowl.

"That's 'cause you're still half-asleep, sugar."

Len utters a squawk of protest. "I'll just be a minute," he mutters, and disappears into the parlor with his precious charge. She can hear the low, soothing murmur of his voice, the soft, besotted psalm of "sweetheart" and "darlin'."

"I won't be long," she hears him say. "Your chair is there, and your crutches are on the settee. I'm sure Karl here'll keep you company. You need anything before I go?"

"No."

"Please don't go up the stairs by yourself. I don't want to come back and find you crumpled at the bottom with a broken neck because the damn fool dog tripped you up."

"Well, isn't that a cheerful thought?" Rosalie says drily, and Eleanora can only shake her head fondly.

_Two peas in a damn pod,_ she thinks.

"I know, but-"

"I'll be here when you get back, sweetheart. Now stop making your mama wait."

A brief silence, and then, "I love you, darlin'."

"I love you, too. You be safe now."

_I love you, darlin._ How many times had she heard the same words when David was alive, spoken with the same quiet, reverent tenderness? How many times had she said it herself, curled on that same sofa with him while she knitted and he scrolled through the _Farmer's Almanac_ on his padd and lent half an ear to the oldies station on the radio? _I love you, darlin._ An entire history told in a single breath.

_And now Len's making his own, building a secret world with that girl that only he will know.._ I love you, darlin, _he'll say to her one day at the family Thanksgiving, sitting beside her at the crowded table or snuggled with her in a blanket on the front-porch swing, and though I'll understand the words, only he will know what they really mean. He and Rosalie._

Len reappears in the threshold between the parlor and the living room, hands stuffed into the pockets of his jeans. "I've got her bedded down in there," he explains unnecessarily. "You all right?" He peers at her with concern.

_My sweet boy. Always fussing over everybody else._ She flaps a hand at him. "I'm fine," she says brusquely. "I'm just getting sentimental in my old age."

"You're not getting old, Mama." It's a sweet lie, but a lie nonetheless, and they both know it.

"The hell I'm not. I'm only getting older standing here." She nods toward the front door. "What needs doing is out there," she says, and stumps toward it.

"Yes, Mama," he says meekly, and ever the obedient son, he follows her out the door and into the yard.

There's a cold, damp fog rolling over the farm as they drive to the pasture in her truck. Not so long ago, she would've walked the distance, but arthritis has sunk its fire deep into her knees and ankles, and on damp days, it simmers in the joints like a dull fever. Most times, Tylenol and ibuprofen are enough to keep it at bay, but sometimes, Lord have mercy, her bones positively weep with it, and she dreads the day it finds its way into her wrists and ankles. Dr. Craig has been after her for years to take a prescription anti-inflammatory to treat the vicious ache, but it's too much a concession to the inexorable creep of age, and so she's resisted.

_You're being a stubborn fool, Nora, darlin',_ David chides her, and her chest throbs and aches as though arthritis has taken root within her sternum. _There's no sense in useless suffering, and Leo would tell you the same._

He would, at that. He would also be her doctor if she'd let him, but that's a mistake she won't make a second time. Trying and failing to save his father had damn near used him up, and she'd be damned if she'd put him through that hell again, would ask him to look at her scans and see her end written in the pages. So doctor Craig it is, and if there's ever an ailment he can't fix, an illness he can't cure, well, then, she supposes she'll square her shoulders and follow her David down that lightless, one-way road.

And when she does, her Len will be the last to know.

She casts a fleeting, sidelong glance at him as the truck glides down the narrow path, and before her mind catches up with her wistful old heart, she sees him as a toddler, four years old and kneeling on the seat with his hands and face pressed against the dewed and foggy windows, wide-eyed and gleeful as he took in the wonders of his world.

_Cows, Mama!_ he shrieks, and turns to grin at her.

_They sure are,_ she agrees, and laughs at his innocent rapture. _Can you tell me their names, baby?_

_They got names?_ His big, brown eyes get bigger still.

_Of course. Every living thing has a name. You just don't always know it right off._

He turns back to the window, small face almost solemn in its determination. _Then I'm gonna figure 'em out. Every one._

_And you sure are trying, aren't you?_

Happy then, happy now as he sits in the passenger seat, so much bigger and stronger, every bit the man she'd hoped he'd be, but with eyes still full of that old wonder. Not for the cows--those were old hat by now--but for the rose-tinted sky of a Georgia dawn, and for the thin scrim of frost on the windshield.

"You know, when you found your place, I never thought it'd be up there," she says, and jerks her chin toward the sky. 

A bark of laughter. "That makes two of us. I always thought it would be here, doctoring folks." He strokes his chin and turns a distant gaze out the window. "There's plenty in life that didn't turn out like I figured," he murmurs, and she knows he's thinking of Pamela, taking him for everything, including his pride, and of David, dying despite all the skill and good intentions of his hands.

"Not all the surprises have been bad," she points out. 

His lips curl into a small, private smile. "No," he agrees. It's Rosalie he's seeing now.

"You're serious about her, aren't you?"

"I am." He rubs the knuckle of his ring finger between his thumb and forefinger.

"Well, I'm happy for you, honey, I surely am."

"But?" He spares her a wary, sidelong glance, and that small, private smile curls into a pensive pucker, paper cast into fire.

"She's a sweet, wonderful woman, and I'm not trying to ruin your happiness, I swear I'm not. It's just-do you know what you're getting into?"

The pucker deepens into a scowl. "What's that supposed to mean?"

She shrugs. "You know, her problem," she answers lamely. "It's a lot to take on, isn't it?" God, it sounds so awful coming out of her mouth, ruthless and narrow-minded.

Len stares at her in thunderstruck incredulity. "Rosalie is a smart, beautiful woman."

"I know, I know." She also knows she should quit before it's too late, but she can't help it. "But she can't move around easily, and I know you, sugar. You'll run yourself to pieces worrying about her."

"I'd do that with anybody," he retorts. "And Rosalie is perfectly self-sufficient in the proper environment. An old farmhouse never built with her in mind isn't it."

"What if she falls? What if she gets worse?"

"If she falls, she'll get up. God knows she's faceplanted before. And if she hurts herself, I'll be there to see to her." He shifts in his seat. "And what do you mean, 'get worse?'" he demands.

She shrugs again. "I don't know. What if she gets weaker or less mobile?"

"Less able to care for herself, you mean," he says bitterly.

"Oh, honey, I don't mean-"

"In the first place, her condition isn't degenerative. She can get stiffer and weaker if she doesn't do her daily routines, but there's a static baseline. Short of a secondary condition developing as she ages--aneurysm, stroke, geriatric-onset myelin erosion or a synaptic seizure disorder(all of which could happen to anyone, by the by)--she's not going to lose cognitive function. And if, _if_ by some twisted act of God, she did, then I'd damn well take care of her, just like you did for Daddy. Or are you seriously suggesting that if I weren't there, you would've rolled him into the yard and let nature take its course?"

"No!" she cries, horrified. "I just don't want you to get saddled-"

"Saddled?" he echoes, and his lip curls in disgust. "Jesus God! She's a gift, not a goddamn burden, and don't you ever say otherwise." He shakes his head in disbelief. "I never thought I'd hear such ridiculous garbage coming out of your mouth. Maybe I need to assess _your_ cognitive function. Hell, you and Daddy were the ones who pounded it into my head that a person's actions, their soul, were all that mattered."

"It is, but-"

"But what?" he snaps. "Not when they might pose the occasional inconvenience?"

"What if you want a family of your own someday?"

The silence that descends over the cab of the truck is absolute and suffocating. Then, "That's what this is about? You're afraid you won't get grandbabies?"

"I know it's not my business-"

"You're damn right it isn't," he shouts, a peal of righteous thunder, and she flinches, because Len has never raised his voice to her. "My theoretical children are not your God-given right. I want Rosalie because she's Rosalie. If we have babies, it'll be because we want them. She's perfectly capable, and as last night so clearly demonstrated, she has no lack of enthusiasm for the possibility."

_Shut the hell up, Eleanora. Just shut up,_ she beseeches herself, but the question tumbles from her lips before she can seal them. "She going to be strong enough to bear them? Can she run after them when they get up to dickens? Kids ain't slow, son, and they don't care if she can't keep up."

"And they're not going to care that she can't walk. Mama is Mama, or are you telling me you would've been any less my mama if you were sitting when you did it?" 

She's not sure which hurts worse. the cold anger in his voice or the wounded disappointment in his eyes. "No," she says. "I'm your mama whether I'm sitting or standing, and to hell with anyone who tells me otherwise."

"Nice to see you still have some sense," he mutters. It's followed by a sardonic snort. "Guess there's no point in asking you about that land on the back forty."

And in that moment, she knows. "Son..."

"Let's just get those fences done." He folds his arms across his chest and rests his forehead against the cool, fogged passenger window, and he doesn't say another word until he points out a weak spot in the fence twenty minutes later. 

 

Five hours later, he's sitting on a bench in Centennial Park in downtown Atlanta, Rosalie tucked against his side. She's soft and warm and smells of Ivory soap, and her thoroughly-scrubbed hair is spun gold in the autumn sun. She's been watching the passing crowds for the last half-hour, dainty fingers curled around a lidded, plastic cup of freshly-squeezed lemonade. "Tarter than a monsignor's taint," she'd declared it upon first sip, and he'd laughed until his sides ached.

"Is it like you remember it?" he asks, and cards idle fingers through the silk of her hair.

She purrs at his touch. "Not sure how to answer that, to tell you the truth." She takes a sip of lemonade. "The manners are home, but everything else..." She trails off and lets her gaze drift to a building built two hundred and twenty years after she was born. 

He hums and drops a kiss to her delicate crown.

_She's adjusted so well that sometimes you forget that she doesn't belong here, that the earth over which she last rolled was vaporized in an atomic mushroom cloud and replaced by radioactive dust that killed everything it touched until the Vulcans agreed to assist in the Second Reconstruction. She should be so much dust and carbon floating through space in a galaxy far, far away, her spirit long since released from its mortal bindings and reunited with her kin. Yet here she sits, a child of the forgotten past thrust into a future she was never meant to see. What must that be like, such profound temporal dislocation? You've never asked her, lest it upset the balance of her mind and send her into an irrevocable spiral, but you suspect it to be wrenching, a mental vertigo she can never quite conquer. So she holds on with the same stiff-necked tenacity that saw her through the ugly, pitiless world into which she was born and from which she was so callously, fortuitously cast and tries not to think too hard on everything she's lost._

_Maybe I shouldn't have brought her here. Maybe this is stirring up feelings best left alone._

_Oh, I don't know, son,_ his father says, and grins at him from his front-porch rocker. _She seems plenty happy enough to me. True, she hasn't said much since you got here, but her head's been on a swivel, and she's alert as can be, reading every sign and billboard she sees. And she was singing like a little bird in the truck on the way here._

He smiles at the memory. Rosalie, happy as a lark in the passenger seat, humming and murmuring under her breath as he drove.

"You all right, sweetheart?" he asks. "We can go somewhere else if you want to."

"I'm just fine," she assures him, and her free hand snakes out to capture his. "My memaw and I used to do this all the time. We used to sit on a bench where the war memorial is now and talk over the menfolk who passed. I used to try to guess what kind of man I'd end up with."

"I suppose she had her criteria, and you had yours."

"She did."

"And who came closer to the truth?"

She raises sly eyes to his. _Well, aren't you just full of piss and vinegar,_ they seem to say, and her lips curve in lazy amusement. "I'm ashamed to say her standards were considerably higher than mine at the time. I was fifteen and would've settled for anything with the proper equipment and all of their teeth."

He snorts. "Sweetheart, at fifteen, I was involved in a torrid affair with my left hand and the Vaseline. It's a consequence of being fifteen."

"Leonard McCoy," she sputters, and the lemonade sloshes in its cup as she dissolves into helpless giggles.

"It's true," he says placidly, and reaches out to steady her drink.

"Anyway, Memaw always said it didn't much matter what a man looked like as long as he had a decent soul, a backbone, and the ability to curl your toes in bed." She tilts her straw toward him in offering.

He plucks the cup from her grasp and takes a sip. "Damn!" He grimaces even as his tongue darts out in search of more tangy bitterness.

"Told you."

"Well, how about you tell me how you know what a monsignor's taint tastes like?" he says primly, and takes another sip.

She titters and waggles her eyebrows at him. "Maybe I have naughty proclivities you haven't discovered yet."

The thought of her warm, wet tongue in his ass inspires a wave of libidinous vertigo, and he jams the straw into his mouth to stifle a gasp.

"In all seriousness, though, I don't. It was just something my uncle said all the time." She shrugs and reaches for the cup, which he passes. "I'm not saying I wouldn't try it, though." She offers him a conspiratorial, lascivious grin and takes a long sip of lemonade.

His mouth goes dry as he watches her lips purse and her throat work, and his cock twitches inside his jeans. 

_Jesus Christ,_ he thinks as his heart flutters inside his chest. _I'm thirty-four going on sixteen._

_Yeah, you are,_ his father says without a trace of disapproval. _And you're a lucky man for it._

He swallows to moisten his throat and bends his head to nuzzle the nautilus of her ear. "Is that so, Miss Walker?" he whispers. "Then maybe when I'm done swanning you around the city, I'll take you back to the hotel and find out just how deep and dark your desires run."

She shivers and turns dark blue eyes on him. "Is that a promise, darlin?"

He caresses her cheek with the ball of his thumb and savors the flutter of her eyelashes. "If you want it to be."

Her answer is a kiss, sweet in contrast to the citric tang of lemonade that still coats his lips, unhurried and lingering with the merest hint of her tongue. "Yes." The admission slides over his teeth like a Communion wafer, and desire coils in his belly like greenbark smoke.

He cups her face in his hands and deepens the kiss, and only his sense of propriety stops him from lifting her onto his lap and grinding against the thin cotton of her panties.

_Thirty-four going on sixteen,_ he thinks dimly, and his father's indulgent laughter echoes in his ears as his hand descends to cup the side of her neck and then the side of her breast through her blouse.

_It was bad enough back at the house,_ whispers a feverish voice inside his head as Rosalie sighs into his mouth. _You came back to find her sitting on the floor with her legs spread in a wide V, doing her morning stretch routine just as neat as you please, though it might've gone easier if the damn dog hadn't kept trying to sniff her feet and lick her fingers. She was in the middle of a deep lumbar stretch when you came in, palms flat to the floor between her ankles._

_She looked up at the sound of your footfalls_ Hey, darlin'. _Markedly more alert and chipper than when you'd left her two hours before. She splayed her fingers and coaxed her torso downward another centimeter._ Did you have a good time with your mama?

_You shrugged. You didn't want to tell her about the to-do in the truck._ I can't rightly say there's anything exciting about walking fences, but it got my blood going, and it's done. _You loped to the couch and dropped into a crouch beside her, muscles still loose and warm from your morning's work._

I could've found more interesting ways to get your blood pumping, _she teased and offered you a sly grin._ Did you find anything? _Karl took the opportunity to forsake his olfactory inspection of her feet in favor of your ass._

_You gave his snout a gentle shove._ Quit. _Then, to Rosalie, who grinned impishly at your predicament._ Found a couple of weak spots. Me and George'll take care of them after the cookout. _You rested your tented fingertips on the small of her back._ You're doing exceptionally well with that, sugar. Just eyeballing it, I'd say your flexibility is twice what it was six months ago.

_She exhaled slowly and brought her palms toward her thighs._ Not like I had all that much to do around here. Besides, I don't want to go back to the way I was.

_It was one of the few times she's ever referenced the pain she lived with for the better part of thirty years, the stony, inflexible agony of spastic muscles and warped, misaligned bones. You skimmed your fingertips along her spine from base to cervical notch._ You won't, _you promised as she purred in contentment and sat up._ In the first place, you're too disciplined; most folks get a six-month break from their doctor's care and end up fifteen pounds heavier and right back where they started, and then they bellyache about everything but their own damn laziness. And in the second, I'm not going to let it happen. I'll be here to keep you honest, and if one therapy or medication stops working, we'll find another. _You caressed her temple._ I love you, darlin. I'm not going to let you hurt if I can help it, not for one minute, _you murmured, and her answering smile was brighter than the sunlight that streamed through the curtained windows._

_She was reluctant to put you to the trouble of helping her with a real shower, but you wouldn't be dissuaded, and she eventually relented. She was surprised when the shower turned out to be a bath, but any protest she might have made was lost in a helpless moan when you eased her into that hot water. She shuddered with the pleasure of it, and her eyes went glassy._

A far sight better than the cold ones I had to give you, isn't it? _you teased softly, and sloshed water onto her neck._

_She blinked logily at you._ Darlin'. _slurred and faraway, and she was limp as a noodle in the water._

_She was beautiful as a nymph, and more than once, you were tempted to slip your hand between her legs and let your skilled fingers work their patient magic, but this was still your mother's house, fight or no, and you were afraid that the snap of Rosalie's hips as she rose to meet your touch would make an unholy mess. So you pushed the thought aside and devoted yourself to scrubbing the grit from her skin. Sonic showers do the job in a pinch--they're what Federation vessels use when there's no water to be had--but they can't hold a candle to hot water and well-lathered soap, and even if they could, there are some places she just can't reach without special equipment._

_So you washed her from head to toe, lathered each skinny finger and the ticklish crease behind her knees and ignored the clench of your gut when you soaped her bobbing breasts. She purred and arched at the latter, and damned if your fingers didn't prickle with the urge to cup and fondle and stroke until she opened that pretty mouth and sang._

_You did kiss her, though. That was a temptation you couldn't resist. You bent over the side of the tub and claimed her lips, soapy hand splayed across her throat. She hummed in satisfaction, and a wet hand emerged from the depths to cradle your head._

I don't suppose you want to join me in here, do you? _she murmured against your mouth._

_Oh, you most certainly did. Your blood was boiling pitch inside your veins, and your cock was straining inside your jeans._ If I do, we'll never make it out of the house, let alone Atlanta, _you told her, and your traitorous hand slid down to cup a breast._

_She closed her eyes and shivered at your touch, and her nipple stiffened against your palm._ Well, I wouldn't want to disappoint you, _she breathed._

Sweetheart, you never could. _You straightened with an effort and set about rinsing her hair and coaxing the suds from behind her ears._ Besides, I want to save something for Atlanta.

_She smiled, devilish and sweet._ Oh, sugar, we are going to have a time.

Now here he sits on a park bench in Atlanta, blood pounding in his ears and far too little air in his lungs and his hothouse rose in his arms. He starts when her hand grazes his thigh and slithers over his crotch.

"Dammit, Rosalie," he hisses against her mouth. "You do that again, and we're getting hauled in for indecent exposure and public lewdness."

"You say that like it's a bad thing. I never did have my wild college days," she says, but her hand retreats to the safer territory of his knee. "I seem to recall you promising me some pretty drawers anyhow."

"I did, at that." He caresses her jaw and rests his forehead against hers.

_Turtledoves, my grandmama would call us,_ he thinks suddenly. _Two courtin' turtledoves._

"I suppose you'll be wanting them now."

"I've got everything I want right here." She kisses the side of his mouth.

He doesn't know how long he sits there in the noonday sun, kissing lemonade from her lips and taking her laughter into his mouth like homemade strawberry wine, but he knows nothing has ever felt so right. For once, there's no low, dirty throb of loss in his bones, no sneaking suspicion that he's a damned man walking, punished for the sin of hubris and living in his hell long before they toss the red Georgia clay over his coffin and send him there in truth. There's no Pamela swanning down the courthouse steps with fuck you in every stride, no pain-wracked voice drifting from an airless room that smells of piss and shit and festering anger.

_Please, son. Please._

He's tempted to settle Rosalie into her chair and take her back to the hotel and explore every inch of her while her cries carry through the walls and announce their union to strangers they'll never see again, but this is courtship, not stupid, meaningless conquest, and he wants her to have sweeter memories of their time here than the textured ceiling of their hotel room, that more refined descendant of bare, dirty mattresses on frathouse floors that smell of beer and piss and old gym socks. So when he finally does help her settle into her chair, it's not to go back to the hotel. He takes her back to the lemonade cart for another glass of high summer, and then they simply stroll hand-in-hand through the city center, fingers entwined as they peer into shop windows at things they'll never buy. Now and then, she stops for another sip of lemonade or he stops for another tart, lingering kiss. It's slow and easy, and with every step, every droplet of lemonade licked from her lips with a flicker of his tongue, he surrenders a little more of his heart.

He does, in fact, buy her some pretty drawers from a boutique with soft lighting and frosted windows and solicitous clerks who wear too much perfume. She's reluctant at first, daunted by their expressions of surprise when he tips her onto her rear wheels and pops her into a store crowded with mannequins and holograms modeling corsets and thongs and teddies with more lace than fabric, but he's determined that she have this chance if she wants it, and so he fixes the condescending clerks with a gelid glare and urges her to browse to her heart's content.

"You get whatever you want, darlin'," he whispers into her ear as she surveys the various tables, racks, and displays. "And I mean anything. Because I know you'll look gorgeous in it. You'll look even better out of it," he adds, and gives her ear a possessive nip. 

Thusly encouraged, she chooses a few pairs of silk stockings and a dainty silk chemise that makes his fingers tingle in anticipation of its painstaking removal, as well as a lovely champagne negligee. No lace or leather or ties that bind and chafe, just soft silk and satin that slip through his fingers like water.

_You deserve all the softness you can get,_ he thinks, and in his mind's eye, he sees the ridged, white flesh of old scar tissue on the backs of her knees and the inside of her thighs. Marks of ancient suffering that had made his heart ache the first time he'd seen them as she'd lain still and cold and undreaming in the depths of her cryotube. 

He'd offered to remove them once not long after he'd claimed her in his narrow bed. They'd been curled beneath the covers in a pliant tangle of limbs, and he'd thought it a kindness as he'd run the ball of his thumb over the upraised tissue along her thigh.

_You want me to take care of this, sugar?_ he'd drawled, and mouthed the side of her neck.

To his dismay, she'd stiffened. _You don't like them, darlin'?_

_I like them just fine,_ he'd assured her, and repeated the gentle stroke. _I just figure they might've come with some pain, and you might want to get rid of them._

She'd shrugged. _Sure they did. Hurt like hell, as I recall. Came out of the anesthesia screaming to beat the band._

_Sounds familiar._

_At least you fixed it as fast as you could._ She'd caressed his forearm. _Back then, they just doped me up with morphine until I couldn't hold down food. I spent the next thirty-six hours puking and crying. Mama said I sounded like a pitiful kitten._

_You were a child,_ he'd spat, appalled, and drawn her closer as though to shield her from the pain.

Another shrug. _Not like that counted for much._ She'd turned to kiss the side of his mouth. _Anyway, getting rid of them wouldn't get rid of the pain that came with them. They're part of me whether I earned them or not._

So he'd loved them, had drawn his finger over the rough, inelastic ridges until she shivered and mouthed them until she squirmed, and he'd never mentioned them again. They were a part of her, like her chair-bound curtsey and her habit of rocking to and fro when she got to laughing, the chair shuddering behind and beneath her with a conjugal squeak.

He might've accepted them, but he would never forgive them the pain they carried, and now and then, when she curls into him and whimpers in the grips of a nightmare, he wishes he could pick up his laser scalpel and cut them from her innocent, undeserving flesh.

Now, though, the nightmares are far away, banished by lemonade and the warmth of his hand. She's in front of a case full of lotions, washes, and lubricating gels, head bent as she studies the back of a small bottle.

"What you got there, darlin'?" he murmurs, and peers over her shoulder.

She holds it up for his inspection. "Warming massage oil. I'm wondering if it's worth a try, or if it's x-rated WD-40 and I'll go skidding across the blankets like a greased pig and do a bellyflop on the other side of the bed."

He blinks, momentarily befuddled by the image of her shooting off the bed like a seal at a downhill slalom. "Ro-ha," he says, and turns his head to quash a bray of laughter. "Rosalie, honey, it's not like you're basting a turkey with the stuff. It's just a squirt or two on your hands or wherever you're rubbing."

She turns her head, her lips inches from his. "In your medical opinion, Doctor, would this be something you'd want drizzled over your cock?" she murmurs, the words a dark and delicious breath against his flesh. "Or maybe over me before you put it up my ass?"

_Jesus God,_ he thinks, and swallows as a wave of lust rushes over him. He clears his throat as the image of Rosalie writhing beneath him rises and sharpens in his mind. "I meant anything," he manages unsteadily, and thanks the good Lord that the sneering clerks can't see his hardon.

She nods as if a grave matter has been settled at last and hands him the bottle. He glances at the label, and then he laughs. _Peach._ Of course.

The last items she chooses before she marches to the counter with her head up and the glint of challenge in her eye are four silk ties. "Med blue," she says thoughtfully, and smiles. His heart races.

She doesn't leave until the clerks have wrapped her purchases in delicate tissue paper and put them into glossy, white bags embossed with the store's logo.

"Thank you for shopping at Cosette's," says the clerk with the sincerity of a stumping, small-town politician.

Rosalie offers her a sunny grin. "Bless your heart, sugar," she says sweetly, and he sucks the inside of his cheek between his teeth and considers bolting for the door, but he only wheezes and seizes her push handles and rolls her out before his lungs explode.

"Jesus Christ, sweetheart," he says weakly when they're outside and five steps down the block. "You sure jerked a knot in her tail. Did you see the look she gave you when we were leaving?"

A disdainful snort. "Please. She's a kitten fart in the lion's shithouse," she says, and smooths her hand over her knee.

That's it. He loses it right there on the sidewalk, doubled over her push handles and cackling until he wheezes. He laughs until he can't see for the tears in his eyes and blindly kisses the back of her head.

"I love you, Rosalie Evangeline," he mumbles, and laughter bubbles in his throat. He wipes his streaming eyes with the back of his hand to clear his vision. "I love you," he repeats, and kisses the side of her face, her ear, her neck. "I love you. Don't ever change, you hear me? Don't you ever." He knows he's asking the impossible, knows that time changes everything it touches. Even stone bends before its will. Rosalie will change whether she means to or not. She has already changed, from a lost, floundering little sparrow too broken and weak to fly into this beauty with a serrated tongue behind her teeth and fire in her eyes, but he wants to hold onto this Rosalie for as long as he can, to etch her into his memory as deeply as his father's embrace and the eyes of a thirteen-year-old girl who didn't make it. So he wraps his arms around her, his hands clasped around his elbows, and holds her close.

"I love you, Leo, honey," she says softly, and curls her hand around his forearm. No liar, his hothouse rose. No promise she can't keep.

"Don't you leave me, Rosalie," he murmurs into her nape. "Don't you ever."

"I won't, sugar." The simple, blind promise of love, fragile as the breath that makes it.

He clings to it anyway, to its warmth and its sweetness, clings to it with same dogged tenacity with which she'd once clung to him in a hydrotherapy pool, her fingers snarled in the slick fabric of his wetsuit, and it's a long time before he straightens and pushes her to the truck parked by the curb.


End file.
